'A small masterpiece' Colm Tóibín, Daily Telegraph 'The most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War' Gabriel Garcia Marquez 'The fierce beauty of Rodoreda's writing makes it one of the masterpieces of modern European literature' Independent I started walking and followed the walls rather than my footsteps, and came to Diamond Square: a box of old houses with the sky for a lid . . . At a fiesta in early 1930s Barcelona, a young woman finds herself dancing with a stranger. Before long, they are married and living in small apartment on Diamond Square, where Natalia struggles to keep the family afloat while Joe - a charmer and dreamer - imagines that the rare pigeons he breeds on the roof will one day make their fortune. But the joys and squabbles of everyday life are upended by the eruption of civil war. While Joe leaves Barcelona to fight the fascists, Natalia and her two children must survive in a city torn apart by violence and hunger - as one by one, the beloved birds fly away. This shatteringly vivid portrait of a woman caught up in the convulsions of history is widely acclaimed as the most important Catalan novel of the twentieth century. 'An extremely moving love story translated from the Catalan, which reveals much about the Spanish civil war as ordinary, non-political people had to live it' DIANA ATHILL 'Go along with Natalia on her night out and you'll soon find you'd follow her anywhere. Rodoreda's writing pays such fierce and tender attention to the experience of being alive, and the tempest that ordinary life can be' HELEN OYEYEMI