THE IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER

A marriage unravels in a Spanish hotel room 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" - * The Times *

"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" - * Guardian *

"[Costello is] a writer concerned with big issues of freedom, responsibility, power, inequality and suffering . . . A consistently elegant writer . . . One of the hallmarks of [her] writing is her ability to get up close to unpalatable truths and politely ask that the reader not look away" - * Irish Times *

"There are memorable stories . . . [Costello] reflects on the world around her, examining its shortcomings with a forensic eye . . . A strong contender as the finest practitioner of the Joycean short story" - * Irish Independent *

"Spare, unflinching . . . These elegant, emotionally complex stories are not comfortable or comforting to read, but they are beautifully, bruisingly honest" - * Daily Mail *