I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness

Hardback Published on: 05/06/2025
Price: £14.99
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Bookseller Reviews

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I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Solà Power
I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of this stunning novel in return for an honest review. What a book it is. It's a fascinating premise - always a good s... READ MORE
Mark at Didcot
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Beautifully Graphic Prose.
Thank you so much granta books for the stunning finished copy of 'I Gave you Eyes and you looked Towards Darkness'. My good god. I absorbed this short n... READ MORE
Jamie Lee at Trafford Centre
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Evocative and Gripping
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a stunning novel from Irene Sola, translated from Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem. This is a story about a ho... READ MORE
Chloe
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Dark, twisted and delicious!
Irene Solà did not disappoint in this new gritty novel infused with Catalan folklore! Set in one house, over the course of one day, this story spans the ... READ MORE
Elise, Bristol Galleries
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Dark fairytales
Following a group of women from one family, mostly dead, as they wait through a day for one of their own to pass over, this book explores the lives of wome... READ MORE
Miranda
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Consumed (and was consumed by) this in one day.
This novel is a visceral knot of missing organs, claustrophobic grunts, and sighs of longing. As an ancient woman lies dying, the women who came before... READ MORE
Sophie at Cambridge
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Magical
Suffused with history, religion and folklore, this is a book heavy with horrific atmosphere. I read this in about 48 hours I was so transfixed. That said i... READ MORE
Olivia at Telford

Synopsis

'Irene Solà is unlike any other writer - she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book' - Daisy Johnson

Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, 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 Joana 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.

Publisher information

  • Publisher: Granta Books
  • ISBN: 9781803511382
  • Number of pages: 176
  • Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
  • Languages: English

Customer Reviews

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I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Daring, disorienting, and unforgettable
In I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, Irene Solà conjures a raw, unsettling world where myth bleeds into reality and generations of women bear... READ MORE
Nemra
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Brutal domestic horror
Domestic horror and a visceral quality to the writing make this a difficult, suffocating read full of myths and folklore and so many women it can be a bit ... READ MORE
Sarah Wood
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Dark, Brutal, yet Slyly Humorous
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem Dark, dark, dark, but cunning and expl... READ MORE
RitaCantStopReading
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
SENSATIONAL.
I know of no author who writes such astonishing, powerful, urgent, compelling and visceral novels as Irene Sola. A talent such as hers comes along perhaps ... READ MORE
Andrew Hammond
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Fairy tales made old and new again
In this dense, allegorical fantasy drama, Solà builds a house of women, the living and the dead keeping their eyes on each other as past choices come to ha... READ MORE
Huttson Lo