Barcelona Dreaming

by Rupert Thomson (Other Press, $16)

In Rupert Thomson’s Barcelona, “much hinges on the lingering implications of old emotions,” said Nicholas Wroe in TheGuardian.com. The English novelist lived in the city in the mid-2000s, and his new book offers three engaging linked novellas in which the protagonists nurse wounds from past relationships or unrequited love. As we explore the city with them, “there is tenderness, and much sex,” but like Thomson’s Barcelona, his conception of love remains “defiant in its insistence on complexity.”