Lushly surreal, Rodoreda's masterpiece is a mythological depiction of a city ruled by rituals, almost like Franco's Spain. Death In Spring tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town - burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town - through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like and teenaged stepmother.