Excerpt from Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I looked up. Montse was still gazing at me, her mouth tilting in a kind of smile, her cigarette alight but temporarily forgotten between her fingers. Then she remembered it. Seeing it had burned down to the filter, she gave a murmur of irritation and stabbed it into the ashtray.

"Well," I said, "you asked."

I was laughing again. You didn't often see Montse at a loss for words.


Business was slow that day. Sometimes a whole hour went by without anybody walking into the shop. When I finished making an inventory of the stock that had just come in—soap manufactured in Menorca, Breton glassware, jewelry from Sulawesi—I began to rearrange the window display, but all I could see was the young man in the car park, in his short-sleeved shirt and his new jeans. I couldn't imagine what his life had been like before I found him, or what it had been like since. Did he have family in Barcelona? Where did he live? What did he do for money? That evening, when I got home, I called Xavi, a friend who was a sociology professor at the university. I asked about the Moroccan community, and he supplied me with some facts. Of the twenty thousand Moroccans living in the city, he said, a quarter were probably undocumented. The figures were only rough estimates, since many of the people in question hadn't applied for NIE numbers. They worked in the service industries, as dishwashers, office cleaners, and maids, or as fruit and vegetable pickers, or else they were involved in the black market. You must have seen the young men on Las Ramblas at night, Xavi said, selling cans of beer to tourists or handing out fliers for restaurants and clubs. Like immigrants everywhere in Europe, they were responsible for more than their fair share of crime, but that was only to be expected. They felt marginalized, and were the object of racism and discrimination.

"Where do they live?" I asked.

"Some live downtown," Xavi said, "in Ciutat Vell, Sants-Montjuïc, or the Raval. Others live in the northeast of the city—suburbs like Nou Barris or Sant Andreu." He paused. "Why the sudden interest, Amy?"

"Oh," I said, "no reason."

Excerpted from Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson. Copyright © 2021 by Rupert Thomson. Excerpted by permission of Other Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.