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  • Published: 25 June 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241568637
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 656

Tomás Nevinson




The final novel from one of the greatest writers of the past half century

Tomás Nevinson, a retired MI6 agent, is working for the British Embassy in Madrid when his former handler, the sinister Bertram Tupra, offers to bring him back inside for one last assignment. His mission: to catch and, if necessary, kill a terrorist gone to ground in Northern Spain after bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza. The trouble is there are three suspects – all women – and it may not actually be any of them. To find out, Nevinson must move incognito to the small town where the three women separately live, and become an intimate friend to each, in the hope of uncovering a clue . . .

A philosophical thriller with a climate of suspense to rival le Carré and a psychological depth that is purely Marias’s own, this is a novel that explores the deepest of human questions: in what circumstances can killing be called just?

  • Published: 25 June 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241568637
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 656

About the author

Javier Marias

Date: 2003-06-09
Javier Marias was born in 1951. His novels, short stories and essay collections have won a dazzling array of international literary awards. His work has been translated into thirty-four languages and more than five million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University and was recently nominated to be a member of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española. He lives in Madrid.

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

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She has won various prizes for her work, including, in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias, and, most recently, the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago.

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Praise for Tomás Nevinson

The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature

Boston Globe

A Marías sentence is a place of infinite richness and surprises

Independent

A writer who loves the propulsiveness of the thriller, the page-turning compulsion that drives a reader through Eric Ambler or John le Carré

Financial Times

This is a spy thriller, but it reads like one transposed into music . . . Marías mesmerises us again and we are swept on by the long, powerful swells of his prose

Guardian

Mariás demonstrates why so many of his peers believe him to be among the greatest of contemporary novelists

The Herald

A Spanish literary great . . . His writing is fine and subtle

Le Monde

Javier Marías's writing doesn't resemble anyone else's. It's easy to parody, but impossible to imitate . . . Javier Marias was the best writer in Spain

Eduardo Mendoza

Marías occupied a reputational perch in Spanish culture that would be almost inconceivable for an American author . . . Most considered him the greatest living Spanish writer

New York Times

A meditation on thought and consciousness, identity and disguise, the gloriously rolling sentences offer the deep pleasures of a brilliant mind apprehending the world in real time

Guardian, '2023 Summer Reads'

The last word from a master . . . His writing is often thrilling in a way that's distinct from any other author I know . . . once you've been inside Marías' world, to spend too long outside is unbearable

The Sunday Times

Javier Marias’s farewell novel sees the late Spanish spellbinder leave us in a droll, delicious, thrillerish labyrinth

The Spectator 'Best Books of 2023'

How we will miss the late Javier Marías and his unique genre of slow-motion page-turners, blending thrillery plots with long, equivocating sentences . . . [Tomás Nevinson] is full of the complexities, comedy and most of all contradictions that define his work

Guardian, 'Best Translated Novels of 2023'