Camellia Street

A major work from Mercè Rodoreda’s early, realistic period, Camellia Street is set in war-torn Barcelona of the 1940s and 50s and tells the story of Cecilia, who, abandoned as an infant, ends up fleeing her adoptive family in favor of a more unsettled life of fire-setting, poverty, one abusive man after another, prostitution, and, eventually, a tenuous note of rebirth. Building on the themes of The Time of the Doves, Rodoreda uses Cecilia’s difficult life to explore the strength of one woman in the face of male brutality. A classic work of feminist fiction that’s as charged today as when it was first published in Catalan back in 1966.