Dublinesque

Shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he has edited many of his generation's most important authors. But he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety - inspired partly by giving up alcohol, and partly by his worries about the future of the book. Looking for distraction, he concocts a spur-of-the-moment trip to Dublin, a city he has never visited but about which he once had a vivid dream.

Riba sets off for Dublin on the pretext that he wishes to honour James Joyce's Ulysses, and to hold, on Bloomsday, a funeral for the age of print. But as he and his friends give their orations, a mysterious figure in a mackintosh hovers in the cemetery, looking rather like Joyce's protege Samuel Beckett. Is it Beckett, or is it the writer of genius that Riba has spent his whole career trying, and failing, to find? As he ponders this, and other profound questions, he marks a death but makes some illuminating discoveries about life.

Mixing fact and fiction, irony and pathos, Dublinesque is a novel of ideas that grabs at your heart. Its first English-language publication will coincide with Bloomsday 2012, a significant year for Joyce lovers in that it marks the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, and the year Joyce's work comes out of copyright.