Institut Ramon LLull

Taradell and its surrounding forest is the pre-industrial and magical setting for this sort of Western in deep Catalan that unfolds during the final Carlist War. Amid the cruel and charismatic bandits, midwives who can read your past, and horse whisperers, the foggy, dramatic landscape is an important character, as our narrator Boi explains: his life is like entering a bramble thicket. And some human emotions are like rat teeth, they never stop growing.

One day while out fishing, Boi sees a trickle of blood flowing downriver, and following it leads him into a voyage of initiation run through with the violence inherent to this land of gunslingers and war, where he will discover tenderness, cruelty, and pain along with his family story. Ferran Garcia’s enigmatic, virtuoso prose draws us into a maelstrom of murder and revenge, a bramble thicket of redemption and guilt.