Award-winning author Javier Marias weaves a darkly thrilling tale of love, betrayal & lives played out in the unhappy shadow of history As a young man, Juan de Vere takes a job that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Hi employer is Eduardo Muriel: a famous film director, sophisticated & discreet. Muriel`s wife Beatriz is a soft, ripe woman who slips through her husband`s home like an unwanted ghost, finding solace in other beds. & on the periphery of their lives stands Dr Jorge Van Vechten, a old family friend with a shadowy past. Juan enters eagerly into Muriel`s world of glamour & prestige, but as time passes he is troubled by many questions that seem to have no answer. Why does Muriel hate Beatriz? How did Beatriz meet Van Vechten? & what happened in the chaotic years after the war? As Juan learns more about his employers, his own innocence begins to fall away. Though he starts off as a mere observer, he is soon unable to stand on the side lines, compelled to interfere ever more dangerously in the dark interior of other people`s lives. Marias presents a study of the infinitely permeable boundaries between private & public selves, between observer & participant, between the deceptions we suffer from others & those we enact upon ourselves. ` No one else, anywhere, is writing quite like this` Daily Telegraph on The Infatuations