Ema and Paul are lovers. Like so many others before them, they met through work. Both are married with children, and they arrange hurried meetings away from prying eyes --- Paul’s car, a corner of Ema’s house, a hotel room. But their relationship soon suffers from this too-restricted sphere, and Ema decides to put them both in danger, at the risk of losing everything.

Yanis’ world is Pierre, the son he raised as a single parent. For nearly 20 years, Yanis spent his nights as a cab driver with Pierre always at his side, so as not to miss a moment in each other’s company. Yanis and Pierre also share a love of diving --- in pursuit of that magical moment when they lose themselves in the deep sea. When enveloped by the natural world, father and son relish an escape from life’s pressures. But for some time, Pierre has been tired. Too tired. Despite how attentively Yanis watched him, Yanis missed the early signs of illness. Faced with the harsh reality of his son’s numbered days, Yanis struggles to invent a life his son won’t have the time to live.

Vera Sigall, now 80 years old, has lived a mysterious, ascetic life far from the limelight of literary circles. This powerful character has a profound effect on those around her --- Daniel, an architect and her neighbor and friend, unhappy in his marriage and career; Emilia, a Franco-Chilean student who travels to Santiago to write a thesis on the elusive Vera; and Horacio, an acclaimed poet with whom Vera had a tumultuous, passionate affair in her youth. As Daniel, Emilia and Horacio tell their stories, they reconstruct Vera’s past and search for their own identities.

While investigating Mafia money laundering in Phnom Penh, Agent Kasper is approached by the CIA to track down the source of the so-called supernotes --- illegal U.S. banknotes counterfeited so perfectly that they are undetectable, even by sophisticated machines --- that are flooding Southeast Asia. With patience, skill and courage, Kasper uncovers the explosive secret behind them and is badly burned by the truth. Meanwhile, back in Rome, a sharp, scrappy lawyer named Barbara Belli has been hired by Kasper’s family to work for his release.

The 20 interlocking vignettes in this slim novel by Yasmina Reza, author of the plays “Art” and “God of Carnage,” focus on the family lives of more than two-dozen characters. Couples bicker over such trivialities as the purchase of the wrong cheese at a grocery store or the playing of a wrong suit in bridge. As in much of Reza’s work, these conflicts are catalysts for larger arguments and the release of long-suppressed resentments.

THE BARCELONA BROTHERS, Carlos Zanón's first novel to be published in English (thanks to the efforts of translator John Cullen), is a hard look at what people are capable of when they have no other options, and a portrait of a modern, multicultural Barcelona.