Few books in recent decades have excited the interest of readers and the raves of reviewers like Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: “This brilliant trilogy must be one of the greatest novels of our age” (Antony Beevor, The London Sunday Telegraph). Now available complete—all three paperback volumes in a shrinkwrapped set—Your Face Tomorrow in its full trilogy, one of the greatest literary masterpieces of our time.
In Volume 1, Fever and Spear, Marías returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of his 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 2, Dance and Dream. The book now takes a wild swerve in this new volume. Skillfully constructed around a central perplexing and mesmerizing scene in a nightclub, Dance and Dream again features Deza, who 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.
Volume 3, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marías’s trilogy. Acclaimed as “exquisite“ (Publishers Weekly), “gorgeous” (Kirkus), and “outstanding: another work of urgent originality” (London Independent). Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza—hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception—back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep.
Translated by: Margaret Jull Costa
