The Infatuations

Description

A breathtaking reimagining of the classic themes of love, death and memory - by Spain's greatest living writer Every day, Maria Dolz stops for breakfast at the same cafe. And every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine. Then one day they aren't there, and she feels obscurely bereft. It is only later, when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street, that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards, when the woman returns to the cafe with her children, who are then collected by a different man, and Maria approaches her to offer her condolences, an entanglement begins which sheds new light on this apparently random, pointless death . . .

Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951. He is the author of sixteen works in Spanish, which have been translated into forty-two languages including English. His translated English works are All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, When I Was Mortal, Dark Back of Time, The Man of Feeling, Voyage Along the Horizon, Written Lives, the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Fever and Spear, Dance and Dream, and Poison, Shadow and Farewell), Bad Nature, While the Women Are Sleeping and The Infatuations. Javier Marias has received numerous literary prizes including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Formentor, and he is the King of Redonda. He lives and works as a translator and columnist in Madrid, and his forthcoming novel Thus Bad Begins will be published by Hamish Hamilton in March 2016.

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. Marias 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 Marias in what is perhaps his best novel so far' -- Alberto Manguel * Guardian * Marias 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 *