Nada

Carmen Laforet · 1921–2004 · Spain

Originally Nada (Spanish)

Why it matters

A young woman arrives at her family's decaying, feuding Barcelona apartment expecting university freedom and finds postwar hunger and repression instead. Written by a twenty-three-year-old, it remains Spain's essential novel of the immediate postwar years.

At a glance

Charged, claustrophobic sentences rendering a feverish domestic atmosphere.