When I Sing, Mountains Dance

A farmer is killed by lightning in a valley in the Catalan Pyrenees, and the novel proceeds to hand the narration around: to his widow and children, to the storm clouds that killed him, to the ghosts of women hanged as witches, to a roe deer, to the mountains. Sola writes in short chapters of great physical precision, and the effect is not whimsy but scale. Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, it won the European Union Prize for Literature.