As I already mentioned in this Instagram video, I read the novel during my school years, and now representing Maria is an honor for me.
Celebrating four decades of Stone in a Landslide means returning to a story that marked a generation of readers and still resonates with the same intimate, quiet strength with which Conxa, its protagonist, moves through life. Maria Barbal’s novel needs no artifice to move us: ever since its appearance in the 1980s, it has become a touchstone of contemporary Catalan literature, a narrative that precisely captures the harshness and beauty of the rural Pyrenean world. This anniversary reminds us why it remains an indispensable classic and why its new illustrated edition is so irresistible.
Conxa is a voice that begins small but remains immense in the reader’s memory. Through her recollections, we enter a universe marked by poverty, routine, and rigid social norms that shape the destiny of those who live under them. Her life unfolds between tireless work, the love that illuminates daily life, and the devastating blow of the Civil War, which shatters her world and forces her to reinvent herself amid uprootedness. This blend of fragility and resilience turns her story into a mirror in which thousands of readers have recognized themselves over the past forty years.
The new illustrated edition by Áurea López offers a renewed and deeply emotional reading. Her images do not merely accompany the text: they dialogue with it, expand it, illuminate it. Each illustration adds a layer of sensitivity that transforms the reading experience into something more intimate, more visual, closer to Conxa’s own breathing. It is an invitation to rediscover the book, to feel it anew, and for many, to experience it for the first time with an intensity that only art can evoke.
Maria Barbal, born in Tremp in 1949, built with Stone in a Landslide the first pillar of a literary cycle that lucidly portrays her native region. From the outset, critics and awards endorsed the strength of her narrative voice, and her later career has established her as one of the essential authors of Catalan letters. Each of her novels —Mel i metzines, País íntim, Tàndem, and the most recent, Peripècies—demonstrates her talent for capturing the inner life of her characters and turning it into literature that endures.
This anniversary is the perfect excuse to return to Barbal and let yourself be captivated once again by a story that speaks of memory, identity, and emotional survival. If you don’t yet know Conxa, this illustrated edition is the best point of entry. And if you already do, it will be the book you’ll want to keep on your shelf to remember why it left such a mark on you. A story that remains alive forty years later and now beats with a renewed beauty.
