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?

THE FINAL NOVEL FROM THE GREATEST SPANISH WRITER OF HIS GENERATION, JAVIER MARIAS 'The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature' Boston Globe Spain in the 1990s is beset by a simmering campaign of terror from Basque separatists ETA, with periodic atrocities shattering an illusory calm. Against this backdrop, retired British Secret Service member Tomas Nevinson - now living a quiet life in his hometown Madrid - is approached by his sinister former handler, Bertram Tupra, with an offer to bring him back in from the cold, for one last assignment: a favour for Tupra, for old times' sake, which is also a favour for a powerful Spanish friend. His mission: to go back undercover, in a small Spanish town, to find out which of three women who moved there a decade ago is in fact an ETA terrorist, on loan from the IRA, now on the run and living there incognito. Everything about the assignment is shadowy - from who exactly Nevinson will be working for to the question of what 'justice' he may need to mete out if he is somehow able to unmask one of the three women. But, still in his forties and lured by the appeal of once again being on the inside, he accepts the job. As he gets closer to the three women, his task becomes ever harder. How - or who - to choose between these three? Intimately involved with each of them, as lover, colleague or friend, he can find no firm clue to resolve the question. But under increasing pressure from his paymasters, choose - and act - he apparently must . . . Charting a world where right and wrong, and good and evil, are irreparably blurred, Javier Marias takes us on a journey of rare and unforgettable suspense in this, the final novel written before his untimely passing in 2022. PRAISE FOR JAVIER MARIAS: 'Unquestionably the most significant Spanish writer of his generation' Observer '[Marias] uses language like an anatomist uses a scalpel to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being' W. G. Sebald 'One of the greatest contemporary novelists' Le Monde 'A great writer' Salman Rushdie

In To Begin at the Beginning, celebrated Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marias explores his impulse to write, the origins of his own family, and the connection between these two different sorts of beginnings. Exploring the difference between what is true in the world and what is true in fiction, he explains why an appeal to "real" events has never convinced him; why the history of his own family with its Cuban and Spanish strands has left him uncertain about what is legend and what is historic fact; and why what has been imagined or dreamed can end up being truer than what "really happened." Complemented by an essay by Margaret Jull Costa on the practice of translating Marias, the cahier is also accompanied by images taken from the works of the influential Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. The result is a beautifully produced chapbook by one of Europe's preeminent novelists, ready to be discovered and celebrated by English readers. "It is a rare gift, to be offered a writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity of the past, who comes with the extra richness lent by a foreign history and nonetheless knows our own culture inside out. Yet, strangely, Marias who is famous in Spain and garlanded with prizes from the rest of Europe remains almost unknown in America. What are we waiting for? All the gifts we are offered in life (as Marias himself is fond of pointing out) are fleeting ones, easily lost or ignored or undervalued and only regretted when they are no longer available to us. It's high time we accepted this one." New York Times

A Heart so White is the breathtaking international bestseller and IMPAC Award-winning masterpiece by Javier Marias, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. This Penguin Modern Classics edition features a new Introduction by Jonathan Coe. A Heart so White begins as, 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? Years later, this mystery fascinates the young newlywed Juan, whose father was married to Teresa before he married Juan's mother. As Juan edges closer to the truth, he begins to question his own relationships, and whether he really wants to know what happened. Haunting and unsettling, A Heart So White is a breathtaking portrayal of two generations, two marriages, the relentless power of the past and the terrible price of knowledge.

'She was bored and fought against her boredom, which only bored her still more.' Five sparkling, irreverent brief portraits of famous literary figures (including libertines, eccentrics and rogues) from Spain's greatest living writer. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

All Souls is a compelling black comedy of Oxford life by Javier Marias, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. This Penguin Modern Classics edition features a new Introduction by John Banville, author of The Sea. The pretty young tutor Clare Bayes attracts many eyes at an Oxford college dinner, not least those of a visiting Spanish lecturer (desperate to escape his conversation with an obese economist about an eighteenth-century cider tax). 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, 'one of the cities in the world where the least work gets done', in a story of lust, loneliness, vanity and memory. Filled with brilliant set pieces and pin-sharp observation, All Souls is a masterpiece of black humour.

'Unquestionably the most significant Spanish writer of his generation ... Your Face Tomorrow is rich, haunting, intriguing' Observer 'This trilogy must be one of the greatest novels of our age' Antony Beevor 'Fear is the greatest force that exists, as long as you can adapt to it' Jacques Deza has been recruited into an undercover spy network by the inscrutable Bertram Tupra. But when he is forced to witness an act of horrifying brutality in a night-club, he finds himself falling apart, haunted by his own memories of the bloodshed of the Spanish Civil War. As Deza tries to disentangle himself from an increasingly disturbing world, the second volume in Javier Marias' magnificent trilogy explores violence, corruption and what we are capable of. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

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. 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. 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, and 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 and morality. Praise for The Infatuations: 'Mesmerising . . . chillingly clear and hypnotically eerie . . . At this very fine and 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 and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust' Guardian Javier Marias 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. 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 Marias, Fernando Pessoa, Jose Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramon del Valle-Inclan.

An essential companion for every traveller to Venice, this is the hidden city revealed in a gorgeous non-fiction account by one of Europe's greatest living writers, Javier Marias Century after century, the essence of Venice is unchanging. It is a place of contradictions, equal parts glamour and chaos. As a young man, Javier Marias made the city his home; since then he has left and returned many times, drawn back to its labyrinth of blind alleys, its pearly green canals, its imagined spaces. His love affair with the city has lasted over thirty years - he has traced every inch of its endless interior, has lived among the Venetians and lived apart from them. In Venice, An Interior, Marias sets out to uncover the heart of this strange and enchanting place.

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a gripping and moving meditation on the hold that the dead have over the living, by Javier Marias, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. 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. Victor, accustomed to a life of pretending, finds that he cannot live in the shadows forever.

'The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature' Boston Globe 'No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this' Daily Telegraph A thrilling new literary offering from the acclaimed author of The Infatuations and A Heart So White 'For a while, she wasn't sure that her husband was her husband. Sometimes she thought he was, and sometimes not...' Berta Isla and Tomas Nevinson meet in Madrid. Young and in love, they quickly decide to spend their lives together - never suspecting that they will grow to be total strangers, both living under the shadow of disappearances. Tomas, half-Spanish and half-English, has an extraordinary gift for languages and accents. Leaving Berta to study at Oxford, he catches the interest of a certain government agency, and its mysterious agent, Bertram Tupra. Tomas is determined to evade the agent's attentions but his fate is sealed by an escalating series of events that will affect the rest of his life - and that of his beloved Berta. Finishing his time at Oxford, he returns to Madrid to marry her, already knowing that the life they planned has been lost forever. Darkly gripping, Berta Isla examines a relationship condemned to secrecy and concealment, to pretence and conjecture, to resentment mingled with loyalty. With meticulous insight and understanding of the human soul, Marias examines the urge to change our destiny, and the hopeless exile we bring upon ourselves.

'Your Face Tomorrow is already being compared with Proust and rightly so' Observer 'One of contemporary literature's major works ... you have to open this book' Ali Smith The concluding part in Javier Marias' spy trilogy masterwork Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the secret intelligence agency run by Bertram Tupra. Deza finds himself forced to watch Tupra's collection of incriminating videotapes of important public figures. The recordings document unconventional private lives - and horrific acts. The scenes enter him like a poison, contaminating everything good, yet he is powerless to counteract them. Set against a background of brutality, Poison, Shadow and Farewell asks whether violence can ever be justified and completes the extraordinary journey that has led us on a descent into hell and a re-emergence, not entirely unscathed, into life.

Dark Back of Time is a compelling story of the way in which reality blurs into fiction by Javier Marias, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. It is translated by Esther Allen in Penguin Modern Classics. 'We lose everything because everything remains except us', says the mysterious narrator of this extraordinary novel, which meditates on the transience, chance and fragility of life. As a man called Javier Marias 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. Here the writer is both a keeper of memories and a purveyor of illusions, destined to be lost in the dark back of time. Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-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. 'I was enthralled by his strange mix of made-up memories, lost experiences and real-life fantasies' Marina Warner, Guardian 'He uses language like an anatomist uses a scalpel to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being' W. G. Sebald, author of Austerlitz

In this story of Oxford life, an affair unfolds between a young Spanish academic and a married flighty, English woman. In the coming together of these two very different characters, English academia, at work and at play, is portrayed.

The Man of Feeling is a story of love and memory by Javier Marias, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. 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, 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.

Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marias's dazzling unfolding magnum opus, is a novel in three parts, which began with Volume One: Fever and Spear. Described as a "brilliant dark novel" (Scotland on Sunday), the book now takes a wild swerve in its new volume. Skillfully constructed around a central perplexing and mesmerizing scene in a nightclub, Volume Two: Dance and Dream again features Jacques Deza. In Volume One he was hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception. In Volume Two Deza discovers the dark side of his new employer when Tupra, his spy-master boss, brings out a sword and uses it in a way that appalls Deza: You can't just go around hurting and killing people like that. Why not? asks Tupra. Searching meditations on favors and jealousy, knowledge and the deep human desire not to know, violence and death play against memories of the Spanish Civil War as Deza's world becomes increasingly murky.

In the dark narratives that make up When I Was Mortal by Javier Marias, winner of the Dublin IMPAC prize and author of the bestselling A Heart So White, 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. Ironic, unsettling, imbued with dread and with droll humour, Javier Marias' short tales cast a shrewd, sardonic eye on humanity. Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-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.