Overview

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.

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9781805301837

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Reviews

'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 quite marvellous the way her gentle touch and patience steers the reader towards such hard-won insight into the human heart and gets us to stand before such terrifying visions' - MIKE McCORMACK 'Costello writes with such perspicacity and elegance. Barcelona was quietly devastating in the best possible way' - SARA BAUME 'Costello is a brilliant writer whose fiction is always meticulously structured, her language precise; but what I find most striking in Barcelona is an unrelenting moral clarity, which forces us to confront the damage we do in this world, to our fellow creatures as well as to ourselves. These stories haunt us long after they are finished - as they should' - RON RASH 'Costello's characters are unsettlingly vivid. For some time after reading, I found myself trying to recall who I was talking to about visiting a faith healer, where had I seen that timid German Shepherd? The entanglement of all living things co-exists with the impossibility of understanding the private life of anything, a feeling of surfacing and resurfacing, as you recognise something profoundly real, yet cannot touch it. The toll it takes on a body to face an unwanted truth and not turn away. These are beautifully realised stories. I am haunted by them' - ELAINE GARVEY '' -

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 quite marvellous the way her gentle touch and patience steers the reader towards such hard-won insight into the human heart and gets us to stand before such terrifying visions -- MIKE McCORMACK Costello writes with such perspicacity and elegance. Barcelona was quietly devastating in the best possible way -- SARA BAUME Costello is a brilliant writer whose fiction is always meticulously structured, her language precise; but what I find most striking in Barcelona is an unrelenting moral clarity, which forces us to confront the damage we do in this world, to our fellow creatures as well as to ourselves. These stories haunt us long after they are finished - as they should -- RON RASH Costello's characters are unsettlingly vivid. For some time after reading, I found myself trying to recall who I was talking to about visiting a faith healer, where had I seen that timid German Shepherd? The entanglement of all living things co-exists with the impossibility of understanding the private life of anything, a feeling of surfacing and resurfacing, as you recognise something profoundly real, yet cannot touch it. The toll it takes on a body to face an unwanted truth and not turn away. These are beautifully realised stories. I am haunted by them -- ELAINE GARVEY Praise for Mary Costello: Costello imbues lyricism into each sentence of her carefully constructed prose . . . she writes with a poetry that extends beyond being ornamental * * Observer * * Costello's writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand - call them themes; they are the kind of problems that make a writer -- ANNE ENRIGHT * * Guardian * * One of literature's finest new voices -- JOHN BOYNE Costello proves herself an absolute master in Academy Street * * Independent * *

Praise for Mary Costello: Costello imbues lyricism into each sentence of her carefully constructed prose . . . she writes with a poetry that extends beyond being ornamental * * Observer * * Costello's writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand - call them themes; they are the kind of problems that make a writer -- ANNE ENRIGHT * * Guardian * * One of literature's finest new voices -- JOHN BOYNE Costello proves herself an absolute master in Academy Street * * Independent * *

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 quite marvellous the way her gentle touch and patience steers the reader towards such hard-won insight into the human heart and gets us to stand before such terrifying visions -- MIKE McCORMACK Costello writes with such perspicacity and elegance. Barcelona was quietly devastating in the best possible way -- SARA BAUME Costello is a brilliant writer whose fiction is always meticulously structured, her language precise; but what I find most striking in Barcelona is an unrelenting moral clarity, which forces us to confront the damage we do in this world, to our fellow creatures as well as to ourselves. These stories haunt us long after they are finished - as they should -- RON RASH Costello's characters are unsettlingly vivid. For some time after reading, I found myself trying to recall who I was talking to about visiting a faith healer, where had I seen that timid German Shepherd? The entanglement of all living things co-exists with the impossibility of understanding the private life of anything, a feeling of surfacing and resurfacing, as you recognise something profoundly real, yet cannot touch it. The toll it takes on a body to face an unwanted truth and not turn away. These are beautifully realised stories. I am haunted by them -- ELAINE GARVEY Praise for Mary Costello: With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion amid the legions of the meek and the unobtrusive -- J.M. COETZEE Costello's writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand - call them themes; they are the kind of problems that make a writer -- ANNE ENRIGHT * * Guardian * * One of literature's finest new voices -- JOHN BOYNE Costello proves herself an absolute master in Academy Street * * Independent * *

Author Information

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.

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