LA CONFORMISTA

A beautiful debut novel by the Mercè Rodoreda Awarded author Alba Dedeu. An exquisite, thought-provoking & unsettling, Dedeu offers a conversation around the consequences on conformity & the multiple paths our lives could take.

Pere and Eva sell rotisserie chicken and the smell of the cooking fat follows them around all day, every day, and everwhere they go. The work routine, the inevitable frictions of being a a couple and, later on, the obligations and worries of raising a family give Eva the feeling that her life is little in comparison with the dreams she had as a youngster. As in her short stories, Alba Dedeu narrates with delicacy and precision the ups and downs, the self-sacrifices and satisfactions of living with another person, and the low charge of anxiety that surrounds the two characters and, ultimately, all of us: the vertigo induced by the infinite possibilities apparently within our reach and the constant uncertainty of not knowing if, among so many options, we have made the best choice. Alba Dedeu (Granollers, 1984) lives in Barcelona and works as a literary translator. Her first work of fiction, Gats al parc (2011), won the Mercè Rodoreda Short Story Prize and the Serra d'Or Prize. That was followed in 2012 by L'estiu no s'acaba mai (Proa, 2012), a short story collection that was well received among critics and readers alike. La conformista (L'Altra, 2024) is her first novel.