Schavelzon Graham Agencia literaria Barcelona

The imagined land

NOVEL. IMPEDIMENTA, 2011. 240 PAGES

LAS AMÉRICAS NOVEL AWARD 2012

EMECÉ NOVEL AWARD 2011

In a town in China, just before the Revolution, a fourteen-year-old little girl, called Ling, admires and adores Xiaomei, older than her and the daughter of the blind trader Liu Feihong. She embodies so much her ideal of femininity that she does not understand why her brother is not in love with Xiaomei. Soon things change and life gets complicated. Both brother and sister fall in love, but not with whom they should. Their wishes collide with their parents' strictness, superstitions, the delicate balance between modernity and tradition and with the indelible memory of her grandmother, who visits Ling in her dreams from the "imagined country" of the death.

Through this most delicate novel, Eduardo Berti unfolds a China full of colourful, sensuous and significant details. The story faces the reader with characters who are gifted with a subtle and moving affection and who also are immersed in a captivating climate that makes them dream. An exquisite work that tells, through enduring images and a sweeping musical cadence, a most sensitive, lucid and lively world.

Watch the Book trailer

National Spanish TV has distinguished Imagined country as the book of 2012

"The reader gets trapped into the charm of an unforgettable

secure, delicate and intensively moving voice."

Leopoldo Brizuela

"Eduardo Berti tells us a story we will never be able

to forget through an outstanding prose."

Claudia Piñeiro

"The story revels itself as the secret flower of life trying to find

its way through the hardest stones of tradition."

Pedro Mairal

"One of the best love stories I've read."

Jorge Volpi