La papallona negra explores the passionate and obsessive relationship between Jordi, heir to Can Montalà, an old ancestral house in the Catalan countryside, and Martina, a disquietingly beautiful university student from Barcelona. At the beginning of a rainless autumn, Martina spends a weekend with friends in one of the rooms that the Montalà family have set up in their converted farmhouse.
The personal and family adventures — including the high erotic tension that sparks between the protagonists and the business of agro-tourism as a complement to traditional agricultural activities– follow different routes, as profit and loss, happiness and torment, splendour and ruin alternate in this novel about tragic beauty, which also functions as a metaphor for the death of a system of rural life that has been around for
generations.
Written with the sound and the strength of a living language, La papallona negra continues a panoramic narrative, initiated in Terres de lloguer, about the profound economic and social transformations that people in the Catalan countryside are undergoing.
