Under an Absinthe Moon: (Bar 67) A Barcelona novella, by Nelson Summers (paperback)

A picaresque portrait of pre-Olympic Barcelona sub-culture as seen through the eyes of a disillusioned young Londoner who enters the tangled lives of characters that paint themselves in their own naked colours: a jail-bird magician who turns drugs into cash; Joselita, a transvestite with a penchant for Oscar Wilde and amateur opera; Abuelita, the decadently charming Madame of Bar 67, who runs a tight ship with her motley crew of day-long drunks and barfly degenerates; and other multifarious fly-by-nighters caught up in the sticky web of Barcelona’s downtown haunts.Without knowing what to expect, he finds the unexpected: as he sits sharing wine and snails with his newly found friends in the intoxicating miasma of Bar 67, the narrator muses: “A city is never one city but a multitude of cities, as many cities as there are people in it.”