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Barcelona
Mary Costello
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Product Details
Publisher
Canongate Books
Place of Publication
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About 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 ... Read moresecond novel, was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Dalkey Book Awards and the Kerry Group Awards. Show Less
Reviews for Barcelona
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
... Read more
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
[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
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 Praise for Mary Costello: With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion
J. M. COETZEE Show Less
