Böcker av Javier Marias

In the middle of a family lunch Teresa, just married, goes to the bathroom, unbuttons her blouse and shoots herself in the heart. What made her kill herself immediately after her honeymoon?

Revealing that Conrad actually hated sailing and Emily Bronte was so tough she was known as 'The Major', among many other stories of eccentricity, drunkenness and even murder, this book uses unusual angles and peculiar details to illuminate writers' lives in a new way.

Javier Mar¿ is the author of sixteen works in Spanish, which have been translated into forty-five 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, The Infatuations, Thus Bad Begins and, Venice, An Interior. Javier Mar¿ has received numerous literary prizes including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Formentor. He lives and works as a translator and columnist in Madrid.

Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marías's three-part Your Face Tomorrow. Already this novel has been acclaimed "exquisite" (Publishers Weekly), "gorgeous" (Kirkus), and "outstanding: another work of urgent originality" (London Independent). Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza-hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception-back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep.

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.

'We lose everything because everything remains except us'. In this book, the author recalls the strange events and people that shaped his past, including ghostly literary figures, a pilot, an adventurer, a brother who died as a child and the king of an island in the Caribbean, we begin to question the nature of time, memory and reality itself.

On a train journey from Paris to Madrid a young opera singer becomes fascinated by those in his compartment: a middle-aged businessman, his alluring wife and their male travelling companion. Soon his life of constant travel, luxury hotels, rehearsal and performance will become entangled with these three people.

The pretty young tutor Clare Bayes attracts many eyes at an Oxford college dinner, not least those of a visiting Spanish lecturer. As they begin an affair, meeting in hotel bedrooms away from the eyes of Clare's husband, the Spaniard finds himself increasingly drawn into the strange world of Oxford.

Victor, a ghostwriter, is just about to have an affair with Marta, a married woman, when - in the bedroom, half-undressed - she drops dead in his arms. He panics and slips away. But Marta's family are all too aware that she was not alone when she died, and Dean, the widowed husband, is determined to find out who was sharing her bed that night.

A dapper Paris doctor dispenses a treatment for dissatisfied wives. A mother auditions for her first porn movie. A writer working on a study of pain makes himself the subject of his experiments. A voyeur mistakes a murderer for a fellow peeping tom... these are some of the characters observed by the narrator of these chilling stories.