Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell
By (Author) Javier Maras
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
15th March 2018
1st March 2018
United Kingdom
Paperback
560
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 24mm
383g
Volume three, the concluding part of Javier Marias's acclaimed and evocative 'novel in parts' Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the secret intelligence agency run by Bertram Tupra. Deza finds himself forced to watch Tupra's collection of incriminating videotapes of important public figures. The recordings document unconventional private lives - and horrific acts. The scenes enter him like a poison, contaminating everything good, yet he is powerless to counteract them. Set against a background of brutality, Poison, Shadow and Farewell asks whether violence can ever be justified and completes the extraordinary journey that has led us on a descent into hell and a re-emergence, not entirely unscathed, into life.
Your Face Tomorrow is already being compared with Proust and rightly so. It is a novel of extraordinary subtlety and pathos. The next thing Marias deserves is the Nobel Prize * Observer *
Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951 and died in 2022. He published fifteen novels, three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-three languages and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He was also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.