When I Sing Mountains Dance

About this book

Near a village high in the Pyrenees Domnec wanders across a ridge fancying himself more a poet than a farmer to reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain. He gathers black chanterelles attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell full of electrifying power. Reckless gleeful they release their bolts of lightning one of which strikes Domnec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him taking up the chanterelles hed harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst. When I Sing Mountains Dance winner of the European Union Prize is a giddy paean to the land in all its interconnectedness and in it Sola finds a distinct voice for each extraordinary consciousness: the lightning bolts roe deer mountains the ghosts of the civil war the widow Si and later her grown children Hilari and Mia as well as Mias lovers with their long-buried secrets and their hidden pain. Irene Sol animates the polyphonic world around us the fierce music of the seasons as well as the stories we tell to comprehend loss and love on a personal historical and even geological scale. Lyrical elemental and mythic hers is a fearlessly imaginative new voice that brilliantly renders both our tragedies and our triumphs.