Books

Michael aka Miquel Strubell has more degrees than you can shake a stick at, what with the ones in Psychology and Physiology from Oxford University, in the Psychology of Education from London’s Institute...

Rupert Thomson is enamoured of a dream Barcelona, a city of stunning views and intimate corners, great beaches, wonderful bars. The good life - everything in fact that the city’s authorities promote and puff

There is an objection (or is it, attraction?) to this book: it is obsessively scatalogical. Max Besora does not seem to have quite grown out of fascination with reciting ’caca, piss, shit’. His hero Joan Orpí’s birth is described in bracing detail of blood and excrement

Jimmy Jump’s beautifully written book portrays dozens of his comrades in the International Brigades and tells the terrible story of deaths and defeat. In addition, he tackles controversial questions with an honesty unusual in Civil War memoirs

This biography of the composer Leonardo Balada is a strange and rather moving book. Balada’s life – even his name – was shaped by the Franco dictatorship, but then he soared above it to find freedom in both life and art

No doubt at all what this novel’s about! From start to end, three friends, the rather dull narrator, the cynical charmer Armengol and the medical student Giberga investigate the eccentric behaviour, then madness, then total mental collapse of their acquaintance Daniel Serrallonga

Salt Water is the translation of Pla’s Aigua de Mar, published in his Collected Works in 1966, plus 29 pages on an ill-tempered conversation about a shipwreck with Salvador Dalí’s father