Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, witches, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party.

As day turns to night, four hundred years’ worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women’s stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Blanca who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Solà explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory.

"Solà pushes past the limits of human experience to tell a story of instinct and earth-time that is irresistible in its jagged glory." - C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold When Domenec - mountain-dweller, father, poet, dreamer - dies suddenly, struck by lightning, he leaves behind two small children, Mia and Hilari, to grow up wild among the looming summits of the Pyrenees and the ghosts of the Spanish civil war. But then Hilari dies too, and his sister is forced to face life's struggles and joys alone. As the years tumble by, the inhabitants of the mountain - human, animal and other - come together in a chorus of voices to bear witness to the sorrows of one family, and to the savage beauty of the landscape. This remarkable English-language debut is lyrical, mythical, elemental, and ferociously imaginative.

"Beast enters incisively, like claws. It arrives with gleaming fur and stinking. It's a creature that spills its guts and impels the same from others-peoples, animals, limbs, foodstuffs, logical thinking, familial and sexual relations. In Irene Sola's scenes, there's nothing that isn't jammed together and insecure but what's constant is temperament. Beast comes swiftly, with a brazen laugh and cocked ears. Watch out when the lines pause for weird and possibly lethal detours. As Sola jolts, pulses and pushes off, she might leave the paths littered with bouquets or corpses." -Heather Phillipson "Sensuous, precise, and profoundly generous in their glimpses of strikingly private narratives, Sola's poems feel perfectly placed for the strange heat of our times..." -Ben Rivers "After drinking orange blossom water until she vomited everything that she had inside her, the writer and artist Leonora Carrington wrote that her stomach was `the mirror of the earth'. Sola's Beast has a duckling in the belly; the words it makes her sick up are evil, brittle, full of feeling. I'm excited to see this translation from the Catalan unleashed on UK poetry." -Sophie Collins