Alone: An intoxicating story of collapse and survival

An intoxicating story of collapse and survival

Mei is a forty-two year-old editor living in Barcelona. After years of unsuccessfully trying to become pregnant, and having grown apart from her husband, she decides to escape her crude reality when she’s made redundant from her job at a publishing house.

When she moves to the cottage where she grew up, hidden in a remote forest of Catalunya, she believes this to be the perfect opportunity to finish the novel she’s been obsessing over. But as she begins writing, or trying to, tragedy hits her and solitude possesses her, forcing her to face her past, an unsolicited present and a future that is adrift.

As Mei’s chance encounters and new relationships with figures from her childhood seem to keep her grounded, the forest and its inhabitants take over her as she fights to finish her novel and attempt to escape solitude unscathed.

Carlota Gurt Davi is a writer and translator from Barcelona. In 2019, she won the prestigious Merce Rodoreda award for her collection of short stories Cabalgar toda la noche. Alone is her first novel. Adrian Nathan West grew up in the United States and lives in Spain. He has translated more than twenty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and My Father’s Diet. His essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the TLS and many others.