This celebrated European best-seller opens with an unexplained suicide in Madrid forty years before the narrator is born, when the aunt he´ll never meet leaves the lunch table and shoots herself in the chest. The next chapter jumps to his honeymoon, as he overhears lovers plotting murder, perhaps, in the next room of a Havana hotel. His father is a curator who regularly defrauds major museums. This seems like material for a thriller, but A Heart So White is a reflective book. It is narrated by Juan, a United Nations interpreter, acutely aware of gesture and the ambiguity of language. So while he uncovers the facts behind some of these intrigues, the understanding he longs for remains elusive. On assignment in New York, he spends time with an old flame. She is searching for romance by sending out anonymous videos of herself. Her strange hunt for affection is an amplification of the isolation of all the characters in this book. Dark secrets remain dark even when they are shared, because they are an internal experience, part of the loneliness of individuality. Translating for two heads of state, Juan misinterprets what they say, just to see what happens. There are no consequences. Marías´s novel mixes philosophy and kinkiness, suspense and contemplation. As in the works of Martin Amis and Paul Auster, the elements of mystery writing are used as a catalyst for existential observation. Everyday events coalesce into tragedy. Connections are made, symetry forms, but discovering truth has a way of making life more complicated. Even when people speak plainly, it seems, it is hard to know whether they have learned anything about their true selves.

A Heart So White, probably Javier Marías, best-known novel, chronicles with unnerving insistence family secrets -and the relentless power of the past. Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; each has always seemed comfortable with their friendly but distant orbit. Only when Juan marries (and his new wife begins to find much to talk about with Ranz) does his son consider the past anew, and yet he doesn´t really want to know. Secrecy, its possible convenience and even civility, hovers throughout the novel -it is a sort of anti-detective story of human nature The sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly send shafts of inquisitor light into shadows. At the center of A Heart So White are the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white" Shakespeare´s Macbeth )

"The work of a supreme stylist... The two protagonists´ civilized but complex marriages recall the compelling intricacies of Henry James... It is brilliantly done." James Woodall, The Times (London)

"The writing shows enormous cunning and a fiendish degree of patience! Nouvel Observateur

"Immense talent... a landmark (by) a genuine artist" Le Monde

"There is nothing like this in contemporary literature. A book of genius" Das literarische Quartett

"As quirkly as it is brilliant... An entertaining and intelligent novel" Washington Post