La casa dels avis

If in L'home que se'n va, his most praised novel, Vicenç Villatoro reconstructed the story of his paternal grandfather, who emigrated from a town in Córdoba to Terrassa. In La casa dels avis he explores the history of maternal grandparents, from the family home in Canet, which was once demolished, to the turbulent Terrassa of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The city of industrialists and workers, landowners and peasants, of merchants, becomes a microcosm of the country. It was not an easy life: the grandfather is an activist close to the insurgent Macià and has to flee into exile, and the grandmother is locked up in prison. The vivid reconstruction of family origins leads the reader to live an epic that embraces the last hundred years.