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The Infatuations
Javier Marias
  • Published: 27 February 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241958506
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352

The Infatuations

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A riveting novel of murder, love and obsession from Spain's greatest living writer

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 Marias brilliantly reimagines the murder novel as a metaphysical enquiry, addressing existential questions of life, death, love and morality:

What is truth, when there are always different versions of events and it is impossible to know even our own ever-vacillating thoughts, feelings and passions? What is love if not a justification for almost anything, from the most noble and selfless of actions to the worst outrages and most despicable of acts? And why is it so threatening when the dead to return to us, however greatly mourned?

The Infatuations is an extraordinary, immersive book about the terrible force of events and their consequences.
  • Published: 27 February 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241958506
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
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About the author

Javier Marías

Javier Marías 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 held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.
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Also by Javier Marías

Tomás Nevinson
A Heart so White
Berta Isla
Madame du Deffand and the Idiots
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3
Between Eternities
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 1
See all

Praise for The Infatuations

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