A traveller embarks on a search for what lies beneath reality and finds villages where the dead walk at solstice, silkworm-like women live in cocoons, and a thousand men in gleaming armour play at being soldiers. Thirty-eight stories of invented flowers follow: absurd, lush and dreamlike, they capture different truths of humanity.

Merc Rodoreda, in these beguiling, uncanny stories, fragments of beauty and darkness, combines inventive force and lyrical power in a poetic voice of indelible magnetism, and confirms herself as one of the greatest Catalan writers of the twentieth century.