Sweet and sour: Barcelona Dreaming, by Rupert Thomson, reviewed

I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and the car engines, ‘exhaust fumes mingled with frangipani’ and beneath the smell of jasmine ‘the stale, slightly medieval smell of drains’. Cafés con leche and jugs of caipirinha with wedges of lime and crushed ice. The clutter of pink-and-white buildings and the port, ‘the masts of boats swaying and clicking in the offshore breeze, the sunlight glassy, dazzling’. In places, those buildings give way to dusty wastelands — ‘areas like this were common in Barcelona’.

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Melanie McDonagh

When will the BBC stop adapting Julia Donaldson books?

The city of Thomson’s nostalgic 13th novel existed in the early 2000s, the financial crash looming like a stark white sail over it and its dark blue ribbon of sea. The book comprises three first-person novellas that are as propulsive as they are lyrical, the diverse characters loosely linked.