Description
Book SynopsisThe Infatuations is a critically acclaimed novel by the great Spanish writer Javier Marías.
Every day, Maria Dolz stops for breakfast at the same café. 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, his shirt half off, that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards, when the woman returns to the café 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.
With The Infatuations, Javier Marías brilliantly reimagines the murder novel as a metaphysical enquiry, addressing existential questions of life, death, love and morality.
Praise for The Infatuations:
''Mesmerising
Trade 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 *
