Mallorcan author Laura Gost is back in early September 2026 with her most ambitious novel yet. Written with exquisite subtlety and thrilling tension, The Price for Being Born (El preu de néixer), to be published by Proa, imagines a world in which no child may be born unless another person agrees to die in their place. On track to become the hottest Catalan novel of the year, translation rights have already been sold into seven languages and audiovisual rights have been optioned by a US and LatAm-based producer. The Spanish translation will be published by Temas de Hoy/Planeta just one week after the original Catalan edition.
The list of rights sold stands like this for now:
CATALAN (original) | Proa
DUTCH | Meridiaan *pre-empt
ENGLISH (World) | Pushkin Press *pre-empt
FRENCH | JC Lattès *pre-empt
GREEK | Gutenberg/Dardanos *pre-empt
ITALIAN | Astoria
SPANISH | Temas de Hoy/Planeta
TURKISH | Domingo
Audiovisual rights sold to a US & LatAm-based production company. Producer TBA.
Set in a world almost identical to our own, this novel imagines a legal principle that reshapes society from its foundations: no child may be born unless another person agrees to die in their place. This act of substitution—known as the replacement, the passing on of life—is introduced not as catastrophe but as policy, administered through contracts and waiting lists.
Life continues, orderly and familiar, at a cost that is quietly devastating. For those without elderly relatives willing to offer their replacement, the chance to have a child can be deferred indefinitely while the government is forced to practice mandatory abortions if a replacement is not set in place before birth. A black market emerges where the desperate and marginalized sell their replacement to settle debts or leave something behind for their heirs. The justice system, too, is altered, forced to contend with a world in which death can be reassigned and even commissioned.
At the center of this disturbing landscape, Laura Gost’s novel follows one couple pursuing a child and the fragile emotional distance the replacement system inserts between them. Parenthood is no longer a purely personal decision, but a negotiation with death. Through their complex inner lives, the book explores parenthood in the twenty-first century, overpopulation, love and friendship, and the moral grays of empathy and selfishness.
Laura Gost (Mallorca, 1993) is a writer and scriptwriter. In 2018 she received the Goya Award for Best Animated Short Film with Woody & Woody, for which she was both creator and scriptwriter. La cosina gran (The Eldest Cousin), her first novel, was the best-selling book of Sant Jordi 2019 in Palma de Mallorca and the most sold in the Catalan language fiction category at the Palma Book Fair of the same year. It has been translated into Spanish (Temas de Hoy, 2020), Italian (Dea Planeta dei Libri, 2021) and Greek (World Books). El món es torna senzill (The World Becomes Easy), her second novel, was published in 2022. In 2023, she won the prestigious Catalan language Premi Proa de Novel·la (Proa Novel Award) with her third novel, Les cendres a la piscina (The Ashes in the Pool).
For more information about this title, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna[at]pontas-agency.com).