A Heart So White

A Heart So White
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307951073

​​WINNER OF THE IMPAC DUBLIN AWARD • Widely considered a masterpiece, a breathtaking novel about family secrets that chronicles the relentless power of the past—from the award-winning author of The Infatuations and "Spain's best writer" (Roberto Bolaño, national bestselling author of The Savage Detectives). Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into shadows and onto the costs of ambivalence.

The Infatuations

The Infatuations
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-08-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307960730

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST • From the award-winning, internationally bestselling Spanish author of A Heart So White comes an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder. "Sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent ... Marías [has] a penetrating empathy."—The New York Times Book Review Each day before work María Dolz stops at the same café. There she finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Observing their seemingly perfect life helps her escape the listlessness of her own. But when the man is brutally murdered and María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, what began as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement. Invited into the widow's home, she meets—and falls in love with—a man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly encased in a metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, chance and coincidence, and above all, with the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face Tomorrow
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2005
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811217279

A daring masterwork by Javier Marias: "Spain's most subtle and gifted writer." (The Boston Globe)

Thus Bad Begins

Thus Bad Begins
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2016
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101946083

**Named a Best Book of the Year by the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times** From the internationally acclaimed author of The Infatuations comes the mesmerizing story of a couple living in the shadow of a mysterious, unhappy history--a novel about the cruel, tender punishments we exact on those we love. Madrid, 1980. Juan de Vere, nearly finished with his university degree, takes a job as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, an eccentric, once-successful film director. Urbane, discreet, irreproachable, Muriel is an irresistible idol to the young man. But Muriel's voluptuous wife, Beatriz, inhabits their home like an unwanted ghost; and on the periphery of their lives is Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a family friend implicated in unsavory rumors that Muriel now asks Juan to investigate. As Juan draws closer to the truth, he uncovers only more questions. What is at the root of Muriel's hostility toward his wife? How did Beatriz meet Van Vechten? What happened during the war? Marías leads us deep into the intrigues of these characters, through a daring exploration of rancor, suspicion, loyalty, trust, and the infinitely permeable boundaries between the deceptions perpetrated on us by others and those we inflict upon ourselves.

The Man of Feeling

The Man of Feeling
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2014-10-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0804172609

A story of love and memory from "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe) and the award-winning, international bestselling author of The Infatuations. 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 traveling companion. Soon his life of constant travel, luxury hotels, rehearsal and performance will become entangled with these three people, and the singer will find himself fatefully consumed by Natalia's beauty. The Man of Feeling is the haunting story of the birth and death of a passion, told in retrospect. Intricately interweaving desire and memory, it explores the nature of love, and asks whether we can ever truly recall something that no longer exists.

Dark Back of Time

Dark Back of Time
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2001
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811215701

A book by Spain's greatest living writer weaves fiction and fact into a completely original and unforgettable hybrid. Called by its author a "false novel," Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his witty and sardonic 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls is a book Marías swears to be fiction, but which its "characters"--the real-life dons and professors and bookshop owners who have "recognized themselves"--fiercely maintain to be a roman à clef. With the sleepy world of Oxford set into fretful motion by a world that never "existed," Dark Back of Time begins an odyssey into the nature of identity and of time. Marías weaves together autobiography, a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost in Mexico.

All Souls

All Souls
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2000
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811214537

A visiting Spanish lecturer at Oxford University is amused, puzzled, delighted and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. With little to do, and unable to visit his very-married mistress, he has time to observe Oxford vagaries and mores.

Pieces of the Heart

Pieces of the Heart
Author: Karen S. White
Publisher:
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2006
Genre: Mothers and daughters
ISBN: 9781101116944

To escape the stress from her all-consuming job as an accountant, Caroline Collier joins her overbearing mother at the family's vacation home in the mountains of North Carolina. As the tension between her and her mother simmers, only their neighbors, the husband and daughter of one of Caroline's childhood friends, seem able to penetrate her cool reserve, giving Caroline the courage to face her biggest fears and dive headfirst into life.