The Infatuations [Paperback]

ANew York Times Book ReviewNotable Book, NPR Great Reads, andOnionA.V. Club Best Book of 2013

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.

Sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent . . . Marías [has] a penetrating empathy. --New York Times Book Review

“The Infatuationsis mysterious and seductive; it’s got deception, it’s got love affairs, it’s got murder. . . sheerly addictive.”—Fresh Air/NPR

“Haunting. . . . Evokes verbal puzzle-makers like Borges, and Marías’s ingenious chessboard plots bring to mind the 20th century’s grand-master strategist, Vladimir Nabokov.”—Los Angeles Times

“An arresting story of love and crime.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“The unspoken romance at the heart of Marías’s work is the recuperation of old-fashioned adventure within perfectly serious, cerebral contemporary fiction.”—The Daily Beast
 
“Great art often emerges from breaking, or at least tweaking, rules. A work that transcends its conventions can produce special results. Here&rsqulã*