Mammoth
The followup novel to International Booker-shortlisted Boulder is a story of queer motherhood and survival deep in the countryside
Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work—all in pursuit of life in the raw.
This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.
Already an acclaimed poet, with ten volumes of poetry to her name, Eva Baltasar’s debut novel Permafrost received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. Boulder‘s English translation was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. The author lives in a Catalonian village near the mountains.
Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Among her translations are Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim award, as well as works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins. Her translation of Eva Baltasar’s Boulder was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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