The Goldsmith’s Secret

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 Barcelo has come to be known across Europe as a truly original voice, and her books as poetic works of great subtlety.