The Infatuations - Hardcover

Marias, Javier

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307960722 ISBN 13: 9780307960726

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2013

Synopsis

From the award-winning Spanish writer Javier Marías comes an extraordinary new book that has been a literary sensation around the world: an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder that we come to understand—or do we?—through one woman’s ever-unfurling imagination and infatuations.

At the Madrid café where she stops for breakfast each day before work, María Dolz finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Though she can hardly explain it, observing what she imagines to be their “unblemished” life lifts her out of the doldrums of her own existence. But what begins as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement when the man is fatally stabbed in the street. María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, and at the couple’s home she meets—and falls in love with—another man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly reimagined as metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, guilt and obsession, chance and coincidence, how we are haunted by our losses, and above all, the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.

About this title

Review:

Mesmerising . . . At this very fine and disturbing novel's core is a compelling meditation on love in all its ramifications (Herald)

The real pleasure is in the strange things his narrators do to the business of narration. Marías has discovered a unique form (Adam Thirlwell TLS)

Plotted with tremendous skill and elegance, this cerebral tale is entirely absorbing (Daily Mail)

The classical themes of love, death and fate are explored with elegant intelligence by Marías in what is perhaps his best novel so far' (Alberto Manguel Guardian)

Marías at his most haunting (Financial Times)

No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this (Tim Martin Daily Telegraph)

Absorbing and unnerving . . . powered by the pressure of good old-fashioned suspense (Sunday Times)

A murder mystery that's also a brilliant meditation on life, love and death (Robert McCrum Observer)

About the Author:

Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. The recipient of numerous prizes, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger, he has written thirteen novels, three story collections, and nineteen works of collected articles and essays. His books have been translated into forty-three languages, in fifty-two countries, and have sold more than seven million copies throughout the world.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0307960722
• ISBN 13: 9780307960726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352