A powerful story of love, passion for art, social upheaval, and revenge set in Modernist Barcelona.

Barcelona, 1901. The city is experiencing days of intense social unrest. The dark misery of the most disadvantaged contrasts sharply with the elegant opulence of the grand avenues, where remarkable buildings begin to stand out as symbols of the arrival of Modernism.

Dalmau Sala, the son of an executed anarchist, is a young painter caught between two worlds. On one side, his family and Emma, the woman he loves, are staunch defenders of the workers’ struggle—men and women who know no fear when demanding labor rights. On the other, his work in the ceramic workshop of Don Manuel Bello, his mentor and a conservative bourgeois with rigid Catholic beliefs, immerses him in a world dominated by wealth and creative innovation.

Thus, seduced by the tempting offers of a bourgeoisie willing to buy both his work and his conscience, Dalmau must find his true path as a man and as an artist, distancing himself from nights of wine and drugs to discover what really matters: his values, his essence, the love of a brave and determined woman, and, above all, those paintings that spring from his imagination and capture on canvas the souls of the most miserable who wander the streets of a city stirred by the seed of rebellion.

With The Painter of Souls, Ildefonso Falcones offers a powerful story of a turbulent era, while presenting an exciting plot where love, passion for art, the fight for ideals, and revenge are skillfully combined to recreate a Barcelona that was once sober and gray, now moving toward a bright future where color and hope begin to spread across its houses and streets.