In Diamond Square : A Virago Modern Classic

A small masterpiece' Colm Toibin, Daily Telegraph

'The most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War' Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'Rodoreda's writing pays such fierce and tender attention to the experience of being alive, and the tempest that ordinary life can be' Helen Oyeyemi

When we were all alone, and everyone was in bed and the streets empty, he said, you and I will dance a dawn waltz in Diamond Square . . .

At a fiesta in early 1930s Barcelona, a young woman finds herself dancing with a stranger. Before long, they are married and living in a small apartment on Diamond Square, where Natalia struggles to keep the family afloat while Joe – a charmer and dreamer – imagines that the rare pigeons he breeds on the roof will one day make their fortune.

But the joys and squabbles of everyday life are shattered by the eruption of civil war. While Joe leaves Barcelona to fight the fascists, Natalia and her two children must survive in a city torn apart by violence and hunger – as one by one, the beloved birds fly away.

This devastatingly vivid portrait of a woman caught up in the convulsions of history is widely acclaimed as the most important Catalan novel of the twentieth century.

'An extremely moving love story translated from the Catalan, which reveals much about the Spanish civil war as ordinary, non-political people had to live it' Diana Athill

'The fierce beauty of Rodoreda's writing makes it one of the masterpieces of modern European literature' Independent