Dams

After three years spent studying abroad, Ada returns to her rural village and is once again driving around with Vicenç Jr. and coming home giddy late in the summer night. She spends long days recounting stories and inventing some of her own: like the story of the farmer who lost two fingers in a combine and who loves to dance; the story of an attack by a cow; the story of earrings, angrily tossed them into the reservoir, swallowed by an enormous catfish, and how the old catfish, with gold in its belly, was eventually hauled out of the lake by some eager then regretful boys. And the story of the dams that could not, in the end, hold and the water that rushed through the veins, that mercilessly and ecstatically flooded the heart. Alternating between the story of Ada and Ada's stories, Irene Solà's debut novel is a brilliant and heady ode to life in community, impossible and enduring love, and the wellspring of the imagination that fills everything it touches with magic.