The Infatuations is a metaphysical murder mystery and a stunningly original literary achievement by Javier Mar'as, the internationally acclaimed author of A Heart So White and Your Face Tomorrow.

Every day, Mar'a Dolz stops for breakfast at the same cafŽ. 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 cafŽ 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 Mar'as brilliantly reimagines the murder novel as a metaphysical enquiry, addressing existential questions of life, death, love and morality.

The Infatuations is an extraordinary, immersive book about the terrible force of events and their consequences.

'I am greatly impressed by the quality of Mar'as's writing . . . he uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being' W. G. Sebald

'Years ago, I said that Mar'as was Spain's best living writer . . . Nothing, afterwards, has made me alter that opinion' Eduardo Mendoza, El Pa's

''[I am] enthralled by his strange mix of made-up memories, lost experiences and real-life fantasies' Marina Warner, Guardian

'Stylish, cerebral . . . Mar'as is a startling talent' The New York Times

'Sentence by glorious sentence, is there a better novelist alive in Europe now than Javier Mar'as?' Independent