In the months after the death of her long-term boyfriend Mauro, Paula Cid - a neonatalist working in a Barcelona hospital -has become caught in a strange limbo of mourning. Only her closest friends know that hours before he was killed in a car accident Mauro had told her that he was leaving her for another woman. Navigating the unsettled nature of her grief, obsessing over Mauro's infidelity and pursuing fraught affairs with a new colleague and a charismatic stranger, she struggles to make sense of her world anew. Told in immersive, lucid prose, Learning to Talk to Plants is a moving and tender exploration of the emotional kaleidoscope of grief, and of the awkward, unpredictable process of rebuilding a shattered life.

Marta Orriols is a Spanish writer living in Barcelona. She studied History of Art at university and later Screenwriting at the Bande a Part Film School in Barcelona and Creative Writing at the Escuela de Escritura del Ateneu Barcelones. Her second novel, Learning to Talk to Plants, won the Omnium Cultural Prize for the best Catalan novel.