Thus Bad Begins
  • Published: 18 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241972823
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Thus Bad Begins

Formats & editions
EBook
25 Feb 2016
Paperback
18 Apr 2017
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A darkly smouldering tale of a young man entangled in his employer's unhappy marriage

As a young man, Juan de Vere takes a job that will haunt him for the rest of his life. His employer is sophisticated film mogul Eduardo Muriel. Through him Juan meets Muriel's wife, Beatriz, a highly sensual woman utterly neglected by her husband. And then there's Dr Jorge Van Vechten, an old family friend with a shadowy past. But what role will Juan play in this unhappy home? What connects Beatriz and Van Vechten? And what happened in the chaotic years after the war?

As Juan learns more about his employers, his own innocence quickly falls away. He starts out as a mere observer but soon finds himself unable to stand on the side lines, compelled to interfere ever more dangerously in the dark interior of other people's lives.
  • Published: 18 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241972823
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Javier Marías

Date: 2003-06-09
Javier Marias was born in 1951. His novels, short stories and essay collections have won a dazzling array of international literary awards. His work has been translated into thirty-four languages and more than five million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University and was recently nominated to be a member of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española. He lives in Madrid.

Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She has won various prizes for her work, including, in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias, and, most recently, the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago.

portrait photo of Javier Marías

Also by Javier Marías

Tomás Nevinson
Berta Isla
Madame du Deffand and the Idiots
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3
Between Eternities
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 1
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 2
See all

Praise for Thus Bad Begins

Almodóvar-esque

New York Magazine

Alfred Hitchcock would be a home with Marias - but so too might Harold Pinter...It's a rare trick to pull off, this combination of suspense, analysis and metaphysics that aims both high at the brow and low at the gut

Prospect

Easily as engrossing as anything he's written before... He manages to tread the tightrope between a very literary fiction and an utterly absorbing plot

The Times

A powerful study of history and memory from a literary giant

Sunday Times

Ferociously addictive, troubling [and] seductive... It works as high literary fiction, constantly picking apart our assumptions about story and fiction, but also offering good old-fashioned plot'

Independent

Marias is relentless in his pursuit of literary and psychological truth

Sunday Times

One of Marias's most enjoyable and accessible novels

Financial Times

Elegant and beautiful, reminiscent of Proust... Magnificent

Daily Mail

Marías returns with another masterful tapestry of noir-ish twists and digressive cerebration

The Millions

Erudite, strange, hypnotic and beautiful...One reads Marías for his ability to make the smallest parts of the world come alive

LA Times

Marías is a master of a kind of suspense that is rare in the modern novel

NY Times

A major work from a global talent, Thus Bad Begins knits Hitchcockian suspense into a hypnotic tale crackling with erotic tension and political strife... The personal is political, as Marías' powerful, wide-ranging, yet curiously intimate novel attests

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

On the page, he is expansive and unrestrained

New Yorker

Publisher's description. From one of Spain's most acclaimed literary voices comes a rich and complex portrait of mutual deception, toxic love and cruel, lingering guilt. A youth caught in the middle of someone else's bitter marriage; a beautiful woman scorned; a man torn between conscience and will. Step into the melancholic, unforgiving world of Javier Marías.

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