Rupert Thomson

"Set in Barcelona in the years leading up to the financial crash of 2008, these poignant interlinked stories follow ordinary people whose lives will be changed forever. Like Robert Altman's film Short Cuts, Barcelona Dreaming is made up of three interconnected stories that are bound by time and place, and by the way characters weave in and out of them. A crime that remains unreported in one story has light shed on it in another. Exploring addiction,...

"Katherine Carlye is an IVF baby. Stored as a frozen embryo for eight years, she is then implanted in her mother and given life. By the age of nineteen, Katherine has lost her mother to cancer, and feels her father to be an increasingly distant figure. 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,...

New Egypt is a village somewhere in the South of England. A village that nobody has ever left. Peach, the sadistic chief of police, makes sure of that. Then, one misty morning, a young couple secretly set their baby son Moses afloat on the river, in a basket made of rushes. Years later, Moses is living above a nightclub, mixing with drug-dealers, thieves and topless waitresses. He knows nothing about his past - but it is catching up with him nevertheless,...

On a bright spring day in Amsterdam, stepping out to buy a pack of cigarettes, a young man is accosted by three mysteriously cloaked women who hold him as their sexual prisoner. Those 18 days, and the subsequent years of his life, make this a wildly compelling and deeply disturbing novel.