Paperback: Nada, By Carmen Laforet, trans Edith Grossman

Published in Spain in 1945 when she was just 23, Carmen Laforet's prize-winning novel has been in print ever since. 18-year-old Andrea, the novel's hopeful young narrator, arrives in Barcelona to live with her grandmother, uncles and aunts in a "stagnant, rotting" apartment on the Calle de Aribau.

The cats are starved, the furniture shrouded and madness "smiles" from the filthy taps. Surprisingly un-judgemental about her half-crazed family - whose stultified lives echo the damage of the recent civil war - Andrea escapes the intensity of home life in a friendship with Ena, a friend from university. A welcome new translation of a startling classic.