A Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker
"Pol Guasch must be one of the best young writers working today. This novel is entirely resolute and clear-hearted." --Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
"Profoundly strange and beautiful, formally bold and lyrically elevated." --The Guardian
Survival is a moral quandary in this jagged, otherworldly debut charting forbidden love during an apocalypse.
In a near future devastated by war and unspecified natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. The young man spends his days taking care of the home and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the woods. It's barely a life, but it's a life nonetheless, despite the menacing soldiers patrolling the land. But after the young man commits a brutal act of desperate violence to protect his mother, he leaves home to find the mercurial Boris, who travels with him on a search for safety. When the journey's demands threaten his precarious relationship with Boris as well as his own moral compass, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he has become the very danger he fought to escape.
An award-winning novel from a blazingly original Catalonian writer, Pol Guasch's
Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its intimacy, poetry, and devastation. Spare and quick, Guasch's debut is an artful, affecting story of star-crossed love under siege and the moral murkiness of survival.
