The Goldsmith's Secret

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20c9

Elia Barceló
Translator David Frye

Hardback
31st March 2011
£10.00
ISBN: 9780857050052

'... the novel is a reflection upon how the memories of love often confuse past with present, and influence the future. Yet Barceló is not simply content to make a point of a love-infused nostalgia that afflicts us all, but actually plays with time and chronology in order to present us with a story that is both credible and incredible … The prose is concise and lyrical, even deceptively simple, as the poetic sentences hide a complex and playful structure' Andrea Acle, Historical Novels Society.

'This is a beautiful, romantic tearjerker without any of the saccharine fussiness' The Writer's HUB magazine.

One snowy night in New York City, a successful but solitary goldsmith reflects on his life, and his unreliable memories intertwine and collide. Returning to the village where he grew up, he hopes with some trepidation that he will encounter Celia, 'the Black Widow', a beautiful and mysterious friend of his mother with whom he had a short and passionate affair when he was a teenager, before she rejected him. But instead he meets a young woman who opens doors onto a strange world, and takes him back in time. The Goldsmith's Secret is a remarkable story with a magical twist, of a love trapped between two parallel times, set Spain in the fifties, seventies, and in the last year of the twentieth century.

In beautifully economical language, and with a structure as intricate and refined as a bevelled jewel, The Goldsmith's Secret is filled with intense nostalgia, memories and desires. Elia Barceló has come to be known across Europe as a truly original voice, and her books as poetic works of great subtlety.

Elia Barcelό was born in Alicante in 1957 and teaches Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Innsbruck. She has been awarded many prizes for her works of science fiction, but with Heart of Tango (MacLehose Press, 2010) she is fast gaining the wider readership that her fiction richly deserves.

David Frye's translations include The Mangy Parrot by José Joaquín Fernandez de Lizardi, and Thine Is the Kingdom (1999) and Distant Palaces (2004) by Cuban novelist Abilio Estévez.