‘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 quite marvellous the way her gentle touch and patience steers the reader towards such hard-won insight into the human heart and gets us to stand before such terrifying visions’
MIKE McCORMACK        

‘Costello writes with such perspicacity and elegance. Barcelona was quietly devastating in the best possible way’
SARA BAUME        

‘Costello is a brilliant writer whose fiction is always meticulously structured, her language precise; but what I find most striking in Barcelona is an unrelenting moral clarity, which forces us to confront the damage we do in this world, to our fellow creatures as well as to ourselves. These stories haunt us long after they are finished – as they should’
RON RASH        

‘Costello’s characters are unsettlingly vivid. For some time after reading, I found myself trying to recall who I was talking to about visiting a faith healer, where had I seen that timid German Shepherd? The entanglement of all living things co-exists with the impossibility of understanding the private life of anything, a feeling of surfacing and resurfacing, as you recognise something profoundly real, yet cannot touch it. The toll it takes on a body to face an unwanted truth and not turn away. These are beautifully realised stories. I am haunted by them’
ELAINE GARVEY        

Praise for Mary Costello:

‘Costello imbues lyricism into each sentence of her carefully constructed prose . . . she writes with a poetry that extends beyond being ornamental’
Observer        

‘Costello's writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand - call them themes; they are the kind of problems that make a writer’
ANNE ENRIGHT, Guardian        

‘One of literature's finest new voices’
JOHN BOYNE        

‘Costello proves herself an absolute master in Academy Street’
Independent