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Knopf
August 2013
On Sale: August 13, 2013
356 pages
ISBN: 0307960722
EAN: 9780307960726
Kindle: B00BH0VSGW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Suspense | Thriller
From the award-winning Spanish writer Javier MarΓas comes an extraordinary new book that has been a literary sensation around the world: an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder that we come to understandβor do we?βthrough one womanβs ever-unfurling imagination and infatuations. At the Madrid cafΓ© where she stops for breakfast each day before work, MarΓa Dolz finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Though she can hardly explain it, observing what she imagines to be their βunblemishedβ life lifts her out of the doldrums of her own existence. But what begins as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement when the man is fatally stabbed in the street. MarΓa approaches the widow to offer her condolences, and at the coupleβs home she meetsβand falls in love withβanother man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As MarΓa recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly reimagined as metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, guilt and obsession, chance and coincidence, how we are haunted by our losses, and above all, the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - August 12, 2013
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