Corazón de Napalm

Heart of Napalm
Author: 
Clara Usón
Publisher: 
EDITORIAL SEIX BARRAL, S.A.
Year of Publication: 
2009
Pages: 
267
ISBN: 
978-84-322-1266-6
Genre: 
Literature
Season: 
AUTUMN 2009
SYNOPSIS

Fede is a fat, gross, lazy teenager, who’s a huge fan of Sid Vicious. He can’t stand the posh woman his father is married to. So he decides to run away from home and go to Barcelona, where his mother lives. She is a lonely woman who is paying for years of drugs and wild abandonment.
Barcelona is also home to Marta, a 36-year-old woman who can’t get a foothold in the art world. Marta begins to doubt her abilities as an artist and the mere possibility of finding happiness and her place in the world. Just then she meets Juan, a handsome judge who looks suspiciously like the perfect man. In Barcelona, the lives of Fede and Marta will cross, in a way neither the reader nor they themselves could ever have imagined.

Publishing rights available from
Company: 
Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells
Address: 
Avda. Diagonal 580. 08021 Barcelona. Spain
Contact: 
Gloria Masdeu
Phone: 
(34) 93 200 89 33
E-mail: 
ag-balcells@ag-balcells.com
Additional information
Awards: 

2009 Biblioteca Breve Award

Press reviews: 

“Clara Usón’s best weapons, narrative skill and naturalness, take us anywhere she wants. In the end it seems as if literature has regained the ability to fussily order happy and unhappy endings, with a justice that, even if not realistic, is maintained as poetic justice.”
ABC

“Clara Usón has constructed a fascinating novel in which, by joining quicksilver and glass, she ends up building a dark mirror, something like a black hole to which the reader is inevitably drawn.”
La Razón

“This work, like the great novels by Tolstoy and Chekhov, hides a multitude of issues: love, hatred, envy, murder, cowardice, confusion between good and evil ...”
La Vanguardia

“A reflective novel with a very powerful, perfectly braided narrative.”
Juan José Millás. Writer

“Clara Usón is confirmed as one of the most outstanding  and original voices in today’s Spanish fiction. The story masterfully combines a good narrative pace and elements of the classical tradition with an accurate description of some aspects of the modern world.”
Diario del Alto Aragón

“Corazón de napalm handles drama and humor with intelligence and naturalness, revealing the author’s huge work to refine her style at the service of her characters. A great novel with a flaming beat: in these times of scrap paper we must defend to death this canvas of masterfully painted words.”
La Nueva España