Maria Barbal’s Stone in a Landslide is a spare, devastating Catalan novel first published as Pedra de tartera in 1985.

It follows Conxa, a Pyrenean peasant woman sent away as a girl to work for relatives, whose life is shaped by labour, marriage, motherhood, poverty and the violent interruption of the Spanish Civil War.

The power of the novel is in its restraint. Conxa narrates without melodrama or bitterness, which makes the losses land harder: rural life, women’s endurance, political violence, and the way history breaks ordinary people without bothering to remember them. A modern Catalan classic, it was Barbal’s breakthrough work and remains one of her most translated books.

2012 Peirene Press paperback reprint. Translated from the Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell. Very good condition with light shelf wear and mild handling to cover.