Institut Ramon LLull

This is the story of Gemma Ruiz’s great-grandmother, Remei, the woman who taught her to speak and, in doing so, trained her to see the world through her eyes. Born in 1906, at sixteen she moved to Sabadell —the ‘Catalan Manchester’— to work in the textile industry, part of the mass exodus from the countryside to the cities of the Vallès region. Gorse is a hardy plant that produces lovely blooms under challenging conditions, but also many inch-long spines; this is Ruiz’s metaphor for these unrecognised 20th century heroines like Remei and her daughters, who laboured in the shadows of a man’s world.

Like the word “argelagues” itself, this novel recovers and boldly reflects a vanishing vernacular: a rich, genuine, musical way of speaking —achieved by recording conversations over hot chocolate and resulting in a valuable work of linguistic anthropology. The combination of contemporary pacing with period language and thorough historical research breathes life into this novel that is both a poignant family epic —at turns tender, at turns cruel— and a vindication of the female contributions to the evolution of Catalan society.