'A short novel that tickles the senses and invites the Welsh language onto new ground.' — Manon Gwynant, Barn

Who was the painter Isabel del Mar? Her daughter Cat, a young photographer, travels from Cardiff to Andalucía to meet her mother's family for the first time. She finds an uncle and aunt whose coldness is its own kind of answer, and in Alejandro an attraction as frightening as it is enchanting. As the family's secrets come apart in her hands, Cat must reconsider both her mother's paintings and her own nature.

The novel is built around the paintings: each chapter opens with a description of a del Mar canvas, and Cat addresses her absent mother throughout. Three languages are braided through the narrative, and because Cat never inherited her mother's Spanish, the reader sometimes shares her incomprehension. The title names the creature said to survive fire, and the book's subject is transformation.

La Salamandra sets Welsh in a European, multilingual context, and asks what a daughter is owed by an artist — and how much of a parent can be recovered once they are gone.