Napalm in the Heart - Pol Guasch

243 pages · Hardcover · Faber & Faber, 2024

What Survives After Collapse

Napalm in the Heart is not post-apocalyptic fiction in any conventional sense. It asks what remains inhabitable once collapse has already happened: the body, memory, damaged language, and a form of longing that refuses to extinguish itself.

The novel opens in a stripped-down home where the narrator lives with his mother. The space feels tense and diminished. He writes to Boris from within that narrowing world. His mother’s loss of her own language shadows every moment and shapes the voice he grows into.

The book then follows the narrator across a damaged landscape with Boris. Their bond is physical and alert. Intimacy exists inside fear. Nothing feels secure. Guasch allows silence and watchfulness to do the work, and this tension holds the novel together.

Violence reaches everything. It marks the land, the family, animals, and the fragile structure of language itself. The mother’s letter becomes the clearest expression of this. Writing in a language that is not her own, she explains how the original one was forced out of her. She knows this loss has shaped her son. The letter reframes the novel and deepens the ache already present in his voice.

What gives the novel its force is that it offers no orientation. There is no clear moral vantage point and no stable ground from which to judge what is happening. Care and harm sit too close together. Love does not correct violence, and memory does not restore coherence. The narrator moves through this world with intense sensory awareness but little capacity to organise what he experiences into explanation or judgement. The effect is disquieting. The reader is not guided towards comprehension, only held in the same uncertainty.

Guasch writes through sensation rather than explanation. Heat, grass, blood, river water, and burning wood form the book’s emotional grammar. Time slips. Memory breaks and returns in fragments. The narrative moves as trauma moves: uneven, repetitive and intense.

The form mirrors the world it describes. Letters, short scenes, and shards of memory create a narrative that feels fractured without feeling inert. The book asks to be read slowly. Each page carries weight.

This is a rare novel that sustains its pressure from beginning to end. It is exacting, unsettling and difficult to set aside. Few recent books have stayed with me as insistently as this one.