Books

Unlike Colm Tóibín's The South or Lucia Graves' Memory House, the first two books discussed in this series on fiction in English about Catalonia, The Corrida at San Feliu is not wholly successful

The book that gave us one of the West's foremost cultural icons celebrates a century and a half of entertaining generations of children and inspiring works of literature, theatre, art and film

A worthy start to this series, The South tells the story of Katharine, who in 1950 flees her husband and son in Enniscorthy and comes to live in Barcelona. Tóibín explains Katharine's emotional journey over 30 years

This sumptuous large-format book of some 300 colour and black-and-white paintings, drawings and photos tells the story of Carles Nadal's life and his colourful and happy art

The Civil War book Between Two Fires by David Baird is exactly the kind of thing you would hope to find when you are aimlessly looking through the shelves in a bookshop

Expecting better luck, an aristocrat and her family experience an eventful welcome to Catalonia

Pla called Life Embitters 'narrative literature', a book combining a youth's passion to understand the world and a revised mature take on the follies of human behaviour

Joanna Trollope, a former chair of the UK's Orange Prize for books, has recently made the mainstream news with her comments criticising UK literary festivals for their commercialism.

June 8 is the CCCB and Pen Català's third edition of Orwell Day

An antipodean writer joins in with the festivities of the ancient tradition of the pig slaughter and sausage making