AIOUA

AIOUA is a mental territory, a place where emotions become images and all the visual and evocative potency of the prose of Roser Cabré-Verdiell reaches a summit of expressiveness. AIOUA is a novel about the need to understand our past to accept the present and confront the future. An intimate, stirring, oneiric, and profoundly emotional book.

Rut has run away. She's traveling on her own to Iowa, and she stops in a little village called Frankville. She moves into a rough hotel inhabited by lonely, lost, and broken women, and slowly, she builds ties with them. But Rut can't talk, all she can do is write the man she left and try to tell him why ... And yet she can't be honest with him because she harbors a lie inside. While she walks through the village and mingles with the inhabitants, she meets strange figures like Frank, the ice cream man, leader of a sect called "Radical Frankness" that advocates for absolute sincerity in all aspects of life. From minute one, there's an obsession with vowels, with rhymes, with finding a nook and cranny in a language that doesn't represent reality ... even with a dog with a God complex. But the real story dwelves on the crossroads Rut has found herself, with an unwanted pregnancy and a decision to make regarding its future. With an abusive mother who suffers from bipolar disorder, she herself suffers from mental illnesses that prevents her from deciding whether she wants to keep the baby or not. Roser Cabré-Verdiell Surribas (Barcelona, 1982) has published in several short stories collections: "Barcelona 2059" (Mai Més, 2021), "Extraordinàries" (Males Herbes, 2020), "Estats alterats de la ment" (Males Herbes, 2017), "Relats ecofuturistes" (Males Herbes, 2016), "Noves dames del crim" (Llibres del Delicte, 2015) and "Crims nostrats" (Edicions Xandri, 2014). She has also published in several literary magazines.