Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 1: Fever and Spear

Description

Volume one of Javier Marias's acclaimed and evocative 'novel in parts' Recently divorced, Jacques Deza moves from Madrid to London to start anew. At a party held by retired don, semi-retired spy and old friend Sir Peter Wheeler, he meets the inscrutable Bertram Tupra. Tupra is impressed by Deza's talent for seeing through people and enlists him in a mysterious group. His mission is to observe an assortment of people including politicians, celebrities and seemingly ordinary citizens with the aim of predicting their next move. Through Deza's descent into the dark world of observation, Marias sculpts a profound meditation on the foundations of human relationships and questions our ability to truly know and understand those around us.

Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951 and died in 2022. He published fifteen novels, three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-three languages and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He was also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

You are dazzled by the author's intelligence and understanding of human nature * Scotsman * Your Face Tomorrow is already being compared with Proust and rightly so. It is a novel of extraordinary subtlety and pathos. The next thing Marias deserves is the Nobel Prize * Observer * He has as gift for the wickedly comic set piece...He seems incapable of writing a thoughtless or throwaway sentence.We need more novelists like Marias * Independent on Sunday * An intriguing and audacious experiment * Sunday Times *