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A captivating short story collection from award-winning novelist Mary Costello exploring love, loss and the turbulent lives of ordinary people
THE IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER
A GUARDIAN SUMMER READ
In Barcelona, we meet a cast of characters who live turbulent inner lives. In a Spanish hotel room a marriage unravels as a young wife is haunted by a past love. A father travels to Paris to meet his scientist son and is exposed to his son’s true nature. A woman attends a reading by a famous author and comes to some painful realisations about her own marriage.
The stories in Barcelona reveal the underlying disquiet of modern life and the sometimes brutal nature of humanity. Whether on city streets, long car journeys or in suburban rooms, we glimpse characters as they approach those moments of desperation – or revelation – that change or reshape fate.
“Barcelona is full of devastating lines … Costello is working in the tradition of her literary heroes [Kafka, Musil, Coetzee]: delivering insights which are painful but also energising because of the beauty with which they’re captured … The most impressive collection I’ve read in some time”
John Self
the Times
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“Clear-eyed and provocative, bruised and bruising: these are the stories of a writer at the very top of her game”
Eimear Mcbride
“It is rare that a writer of fiction can evoke such depth of feeling and visceral/moral revulsion as Mary Costello … in stories dealing with cruelty to animals, especially the slaughter of farm animals; rare that marital intimacy is so powerfully rendered”
Joyce Carol Oates
“Costello’s writing is insistent, precise and unsparing. Everyday acts and ordinary lives are infused with a sense of the skull beneath the skin and of a catastrophe held tautly at bay”
observer
“Beautiful, quietly shattering … haunting, powerful stories … Costello explores the violence behind painful silences in domestic life … Amid complex chains of cruelty, Costello offers transcendent moments of completeness”
Emily Rhodes
guardian
Mary Costello
Mary Costello lives in Galway. Her short story collection, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street (2014), won the Irish Novel of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards and was named overall Irish Book of the Year. The River Capture, her second novel, was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Dalkey Book Awards and the Kerry Group Awards.