When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson --- the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. But when Tomás returns to Madrid from his studies at Oxford, he is a changed man. Unbeknownst to her, he has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services, and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned.

Javier Marías is a tireless examiner of the world around us: essayist, novelist, translator, voracious reader, enthusiastic debunker of pretension and vigorous polymath. He is able to discover what many of us fail to notice or have never put into words, and he keeps looking long after most of us have turned away. This new collection of essays journeys from the crumbling canals of Venice to the wide horizons of the Wild West, and Marías captures each new vista with razor-sharp acuity and wit. He explores subjects ranging from soccer to classic cinema, from comic books and toy soldiers to mortality and memory, from “The Most Conceited of Cities” to “Why Almost No One Can Be Trusted,” making each brilliantly and inimitably his own.

In Madrid, 1980, five years after dictator Francisco Franco's death, Juan de Vere takes a job assisting Eduardo Muriel, a film director in the twilight of his career. Muriel is eccentric but charming, an irresistible idol for Juan. But certain people --- and forces --- loom, among them Beatriz, Muriel's difficult wife; and Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a mysterious figure implicated in unsavory rumors involving Muriel. As Juan digs deeper into all three of their lives, the deceptions and loyalties he begins to uncover will change the course of his young life.

María Dolz eats breakfast every morning in the same café as an elegant husband and wife with whom she has never spoken. She knows nothing about them, not even their names. When they fail to show up one morning, she reads in the newspaper later that day that the man has been murdered, the victim of an apparently random attack. THE INFATUATIONS is a brilliant meditation on fate and the vagaries of desire.