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Your Face Tomorrow, Volume I: Fever and Spear, by Javier Marias

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

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

Part spy novel, part romance, part Henry James, Your Face Tomorrow is a wholly remarkable display of the immense gifts of Javier Marias. With Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding novel Your Face Tomorrow, he returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of All Souls and Dark Back of Time), while introducing us to territory entirely new--espionage.

Our hero, Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is a bit adrift in London until his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler--retired Oxford don and semi-retired master spy--recruits him for a new career in British Intelligence. Deza possesses a rare gift for seeing behind the masks people wear. He is soon observing interviews conducted by Her Majesty's secret service: variously shady international businessmen one day, would-be coup leaders the next. Seductively, this metaphysical thriller explores past, present, and future in the ever-more-perilous 21st century. This compelling and enigmatic tour de force from one of Europe's greatest writers continues with Volume Two, Dance and Dream, currently available in hardcover

JAVIER MARIAS, born in Madrid in 1951, has been translated into 34 languages, and more than five million copies of his books have been sold worldwide: he has been called a "supreme stylist" (The London Times), "a great writer" (Salman Rushdie), and "a rare gift" (The New York Times). Translator Margaret Jull Costa lives in Leicester, England, and has translated works by Portuguese writers as well as a number of notable Spanish authors.

"The mechanisms of reflection and digression, broken down into their tiniest constituent parts, are always the focus of attention in Spanish novelist Marias's sophisticated novels (A Heart So White; Dark Back of Time; etc.). In his leisurely, incisive latest, these preoccupations fuel a plot with a spy-novel gloss. Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is at loose ends in London when his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler, a retired Oxford don, introduces him to the head of a secret government bureau of elite analysts with the ability to see past people's facades and predict their future behavior. A cocktail party test proves Deza to be one of the elect, and he goes to work clandestinely observing all sorts of people, from South American generals to pop stars. Deza also brings his finely tuned mind to bear on Wheeler's mysterious past and on his own family history, both of which are shadowed by the Spanish Civil War. Marias's long-drawn-out dance of withholding and revelation comes to a halt mid-step--the book is the first half of a single larger work, not a stand-alone volume--but readers with an appreciation for the author's deliberate, exquisite prose won't mind waiting for the second volume." --Publishers Weekly

"Marias's most extravagant showcase for 'literary thinking' so far….a compelling introduction to his writing." --Wyatt Mason, The New Yorker

"The major event on the Anglo-Spanish literary scene….Jull Costa's English translation is impeccable." --Ian Michael, TLS

"Marias is a gorgeous stylist, his prose thrillingly meandering in his native tongue and pleasantly rendered here." --Kirkus Reviews

"Probably the greatest living and widely known writer in the world." --Eli S. Evans, n+1

Date of publication: September 2007