It’s February 2019. Philip Notman, an acclaimed historian with a German wife and a troubled 19-year-old son, is on his way back from a conference in Norway when he has an unexpected and disturbing experience that completely alters his view of the life that he has been living and the world that surrounds him. Believing that Inés, an attractive Spanish sociologist whom he met at the conference, can shed light on what he is feeling, he travels to Cádiz to see her. But his journey doesn’t end there. Is he thinking of leaving his wife, whom he still loves, or is he trying to change a reality that he appears to find unbearable? Is he on a quest for a simpler and more authentic existence, or is he utterly self-deluded? And if he is in denial about what he is doing, how far will he go to avoid facing the truth?

Set on the eve of the financial crash of 2008, BARCELONA DREAMING is narrated, in turn, by an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcoholic jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love, all of whose lives will be changed forever. Underpinning the novel, and casting a long shadow, is a crime committed against a young Moroccan immigrant.

In the years preceding World War I, two young women meet in a provincial town in France. Suzanne Malherbe, a shy 17-year-old with a talent for drawing, is completely entranced by the brilliant but troubled Lucie Schwob, who comes from a family of wealthy Jewish intellectuals. They embark on a clandestine love affair, but then, in an astonishing twist of fate, the mother of one marries the father of the other. As “sisters” they are finally free of suspicion and move to Paris at a moment when art, literature and politics blend in an explosive cocktail. In the 1930s, with the rise of anti-Semitism and threat of fascism, they leave Paris for Jersey, creating a campaign of propaganda against Hitler’s occupying forces that will put their lives in jeopardy.

Unmoored by her mother’s death and feeling her father to be an increasingly distant figure, Katherine Carlyle abandons the set course of her life and starts out on a mysterious journey to the ends of the world. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scène for a courageous leap to true empowerment.