Description

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.

Publisher Review

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 The characters in these stories yearn for connection, to be understood. Mary Costello shows how a fleeting insight or incident can transform a life completely and how the secret self determines our actions for better or worse. Gorgeously written provocative and brave — GABRIEL BYRNE Barcelona is an unsettling and brilliant short story collection. Costello writes with scrupulous attention, and these stories are a fine exploration of the tension in the Ordinary, the beauty in the banal, the cost of love and loss. A writer adept at excavating human nature and our concealed inner worlds, this collection was outstanding — ELAINE FEENEY 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 — 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