For six summers in the 1920s, a wealthy couple invites their friends to stay at their villa, with its garden overlooking the Mediterranean. They drink and dine, play games, gossip, and flirt, and use and abuse their little paradise. Their antics are all related by the gardener, whose own relationship with the place is tainted by the loss of his wife, once a maid there at his side. The garden provides both backdrop and conduit for every turn in the glamorous couple's lives. And even when tragedy takes hold, the grumbling but loyal gardener translates every development into the language he knows best: that of the flowers he tends.With this achingly beautiful tale of glamour and betrayal, Rodoreda brings a Fitzgeraldian spike to the heady cocktail of the Catalunyan coast.



Mercè Rodoreda is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began writing the novels and short stories - Twenty-Two Short Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, Garden by the Sea - that would eventually make her internationally famous, while at the same time earning a living as a seamstress. In the mid-1960s, she returned to Catalonia, where she continued to write. The mother and daughter team of Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño has translated a number of works from Spanish and Catalan into English, including War, So Much War by Mercè Rodoreda. Tennent also received a NEA fellowship for her translation of The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda.



'Rodoreda plumbs a sadness that reaches beyond historic circumstances . . . an almost voluptuous vulnerability.'



'Rodoreda has bedazzled me by the sensuality with which she reveals things within the atmosphere of her novels.'



'Arguably the most celebrated Catalan writer of the past century ... An overdue and riveting addition to Rodoreda's growing archive of works available to readers of English ... It is Garden by the Sea's understated nature that makes it so elegant, and so captivating. This is a novel that slowly "unfolds" in ... petals. Layers of information unfurl, piece by piece, until finally the whole picture is in bloom.'



'Rodoreda's crowning achievement in Garden by the Sea is the character of the narrator ... Decades ago, he lived through the great tragedy of his life. Slowly, he has learned from his garden how to accept it. Now, in his own reserved and unique way, he imparts that knowledge to the people around him. This is the essence of Garden by the Sea.'



Rodoreda is one of those discoveries that changes the reader's perspective, because she invites them into a literary world as distinct and sophisticated as Proust's Paris or William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. In Rodoreda's world, there are no decadent aristocrats or bankrupt southerners. There are Catalans disorientated by a twentieth century that has ridden roughshod over them and destroyed their city, Barcelona, which is the epicentre of some of the author's novels. If Rodoreda is the most important Catalan woman writer of the last century, it is because she transfers a world that only exists in her memory into her books, as often happens in the work of the greatest writers.Her life is the most crystalline explanation for this ruined world.



A Nabokovian precision of observation and transformation ofplain experience into enchanting prose



"Mercè Rodoreda is the writer I cannot stop talking about."