After a year and a half into the pandemic, in which Barcelona has emptied and tourists haven’t been able to visit our city, Francesc Soler’s novel hits shelves. This novel is a harsh critique, precisely, about BARCELONA being sold to tourism and being a city in the service of tourists, rather than of locals. This book was written before the pandemic, but it arrives in the best moment, given that after everything we have been through, many of those who complained about tourists now miss them, or the other way round. What do you think?

In this funny novel Soler explains what an architect of the Olympic Barcelona, a fishmonger working in the Boqueria market, an editor from the Upper Diagonal, an immigrant who dresses up as a Disney princess and acts as a human statue in the Rambla or the priest of Sagrada Familia have in common. They are fed up with Barcelona being a tourist destination, a city in the service of foreigners, rather than locals and which they no longer recognize or feel as their own. And what would happen if these characters, divergent but typically Barcelonian, decided to stop complaining and joined forces to develop a transformative project for the city, much more radical than the Olympic Games?

Barcelona demà o aquesta tarda is an absolutely original and seemingly simple story, but full of nuances and plot twists, fast paced with concise and clear language that hooks the reader from the very first page. A satiric and parodic story that can also be read as a disturbing dystopia.