In the shady backstreets of late nineteenth-century Barcelona, where nothing is quite what it seems, a prosperous heir’s carefree life is turned upside down when he investigates the mysterious disappearance of his working-class mistress.
Maurici Aldabò is the scion of a prominent manufacturing family, a member of the wealthy Barcelona bourgeoisie. But Aldabò’s seemingly charmed life is interrupted when his mistress, a seamstress, vanishes without a trace, drawing him into an obsessive search through the city’s underworld. Inspired by a popular urban legend about the white slave trade and the disappearance of a young woman in a lingerie store, the novel explores the connections between Barcelona’s criminal underground and its echelons of power. Named after a real street in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, The Street of the Three Beds reveals the colorful and corrupt hidden life of the city. Roser Caminals (b. 1956), a Barcelona native, is a literary translator and prize-winning novelist. Caminals earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Barcelona. She won an award from the Spanish embassy for her English translation of Emilia Pardo Bazan’s The House of Ulloa, and her own work has been published in three languages. In 1996, her novel Les herbes secretes (The secret herbs) won first prize in the Jocs Florals de la Diàspora contest, for expatriate authors writing in Catalan. She has also published a nonfiction book, La seducció americana (The American seduction), which draws on her experiences in the United States, where she has lived since 1981. The Street of the Three Beds is the first in a trilogy that depicts Barcelona at the turn of the twentieth century. Caminals is a professor of Spanish at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, and is married to author William Heath.