Barcelona Dreaming

Thomson is at his full powers in this 13th captivating novel. He reaffirms his gift for writing on place, bringing Barcelona vividly and complexly to life for a travel-starved pandemic audience. His confident , spellbinding prose is jewelled with uncanny details, gliding along in language that strikes, unsettles, and reawakens at every turn. This is a brilliant book.

Rupert Thomson's Barcelona Dreaming tells three lightly interlinked stories of residents of the city on the eve of the financial crash of 2008. Thomson conjures up a fascinating cast of beautiful people with complicated lives who've lost a lot and have more to lose.

Elegant and electrifying. Thomson's prose is sparse, yet so highly charged that I couldn't stop reading. I love all his novels - but this one is my new favourite.

Barcelona Dreaming feels like a holiday in bookform.

One of contemporary fiction's most original writers makes you ponder matters of love and humaity, using the Catalan capital as an elegant backdrop.

'The next best thing to actually moving to the Catalan capital'

I don't know how Rupert Thomson does it. Each novel he writes is a new vision of a new world; he's the least predictable, the most surprising of writers. Barcelona Dreaming is set in that city, and it seems as if Thomson knows every corner of it, and every kind of human being who might live there. My astonishment is only surpassed by my admiration.

I wonder if I've ever sat so intimately alongside characters in a story. Rupert Thomson has so brought this writing to life I can literally feel it on my skin. Save yourself the airfare: your new friends in Barcelona live right here

Thomson displays a graceful ability to inhabit the responses and concerns of all sorts of characters.

'I was captured by Barcelona Dreaming'

What a haunting book. I didn't want to finish it...The stories have stayed with me as if they are actually memories...Extraordinary

The three stories in Barcelona Dreaming are connected by ingeniously created threads, but also by a tone that is ironic, observant, alert to the complexity of the characters' motives and desires. The book is set in the modern city of Barcelona, its atmosphere invoked with intimate knowledge and a matchless sense of place.

The supremely sensuous rendering of Barcelona itself is superb

The writing itself feels effortlessly sumptuous, it's a beautifully imagined set of worlds.

Barcelona Dreaming is the next most pleasurable thing to passing a season in one of Europe's most attractive cities and Thomson doesn't put a foot wrong evoking its dramas and charms.

An astonishing new offering from one of our greatest writers. Every Rupert Thomson book is a rare feat. This dexterous, potent exploration of characters connected by time, place and the ramifications of a crime is the latest addition to a singular body of work

'It has a great sense of place and compelling female characters.'

Barcelona Dreaming is a wonderful book, a phantasmal hymn to a city and a lost way of life