Dublinesque

Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he has published many of his generation's most important authors. But he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety - about the digital revolution and its threat to books and 'high culture', and about the fact that he has yet to discover in the younger generation a writer of 'genius'. One night he has a vivid dream that takes place in Dublin, a city he has never visited. In the dream a funeral is being held for the printing press, at the same time as a homage to James Joyce's Ulysses. At the graveside hovers a mysterious figure in a mackintosh. Who is this? James Joyce, his prot g Samuel Beckett, or the elusive great writer that Riba so longs to find? Gathering together a group of friends, Riba decides to travel to Dublin for Bloomsday to hold his very own funeral for the book. In the process of marking a death, he makes some illuminating discoveries about life. Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be one of the most important contemporary Spanish novelists, and Dublinesca has been declared his masterpiece. Mixing fact and fiction, irony and pathos, Dublinesca 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.