Institut Ramon LLull

Dead Lands opens with a family waiting for an imminent yet agonizing death: a dying son, shot in the back by someone in his family, but who? As the story unfolds through manifold perspectives, we discover that this shocking fratricide is just the most recent in a long line of violence: economic, societal, sexual… that traverses this tangled family of hard hearts in a hard landscape.

Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character, a series of monologues set over the course of a couple of days in the last century. A potent new voice in the Catalan rural drama tradition, Bendicho’s visceral, viscous descriptions pull readers into a grotesque, chiaroscuro universe.