In a near future devastated by war and natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. Society is militarized and dangerous, with men patrolling the land as families are uprooted and nature is all but decimated. The young man spends his days helping his mother, who is traumatized from working in the ominous Factory, and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest.
After a brutal act of desperate violence, the young man leaves his mother and finds Boris, who travels with him to the city. Escaping slavers and trekking through the empty landscape, the two find moments of intimacy despite their circumstances. But as their survival comes with increasingly violent demands, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he’s become the very thing he’s fought to escape.
An award-winning breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch’s debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.
