
The Infatuations is a critically acclaimed novel by the great Spanish writer Javier Marias. Every day, Maria Dolz stops for breakfast at the same cafe. & every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine. Then one day they aren`t there, & 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 cafe with her children, who are then collected by a different man, & 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 & morality. Praise for The Infatuations: ” Mesmerising...chillingly clear & hypnotically eerie... At this very fine & disturbing novel`s core is a compelling meditation on love in all its ramifications”. (Herald). ” Keeps us guessing until almost the last page”. (Financial Times).” Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger & many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, & is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare & Sterne, as well as Cervantes & Proust”. (Guardian). Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories & several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages & won a dazzling array of international literary awards. Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years & has translated many novels & short stories by Portuguese, Spanish & Latin American writers, including Javier Marias, Fernando Pessoa, Jose Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga & Ramon del Valle-Inclan.