Jordi Coca is one of the most outstanding novelists in contemporary Catalan literature. He is the author of many novels that have won major literary prizes, and he also writes short fiction, essays, poetry, drama, translation and journalism.

Exploring a boy's childhood in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship, 'Under the Dust' is based on the autobiographical experience of prize-winning Catalan author Jordi Coca. In period and location – an oppressive late 1940s and early 50s when the dictatorship's repression was strongly felt at all levels of people's everyday lives – the novel echoes the recent bestseller 'The Shadow of the Wind'. But the affecting closeness of the boy’s first-person narrative and its pitiless realism set this book apart. The boy's bewildered responses to his father's violence and authoritarianism are played out at home and in a neighbourhood dominated by street gangs, where politics is never more than a block away. This novel was awarded the Sant Jordi prize in 2000.