“It is rare that a writer of fiction can evoke such depth of feeling and visceral, moral revulsion.” –Joyce Carol Oates
"A strong contender as the finest modern practitioner of the Joycean short story, with its trademark epiphany.” –The Irish Independent
"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.” –The Observer
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.