A Broken Mirror

'Rodoreda has bedazzled me.' Gabriel García Máarquez

A haunting classic of modern Catalan literature from one of Spain's most prestigious writers.

Extending from the prosperous Barcelona of the 1870s to the advent of the Franco dictatorship and the Spanish Civil War, A Broken Mirror traces three generations of a burgeoning aristocratic family at the turn of the 19th century.

When Salvador Valldaura first meets Teresa Goday he is seduced by her velvety eyes and contagious laughter. Valldaura, a wealthy diplomat, and Teresa, a widowed fishmonger's daughter, marry and move into a grand, sprawling villa on the outskirts of Barcelona. In that house, their family flourishes and fractures across a century of change: from Teresa's second husband and her secret, illegitimate son Masdéu, to daughter Sofia and Sofia's playboy husband Eladi, and son, Ramon, tormented by a heinous act from his childhood and unknowingly in love with his half-sister, as well as several generations of servants, ghosts and even a rodent.

Through a kaleidoscope of perspectives and turning upon events both intimate and historic, A Broken Mirror tells the story of a splintering matriarchal dynasty founded on love, lies, secrets, and betrayals.

Translated by Josep Miquel Sobrer

Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983) has emerged as perhaps the most important fiction writer of the twentieth century in Catalan literature and is one of the most interesting writers of the contemporary Spanish literary world. She is primarily known in this country for her novel The Time of the Doves, published in English translation. Josep Miquel Sobrer is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. The editor of Catalan Review, he has also edited and translated an anthology of Catalan texts, Catalonia: A Self-Portrait.