Thus Bad Begins - Hardcover

*Named the #1 Best Book of the Year in Spain by El País*

"As a literary mystery, Thus Bad Begins calls to mind Paul Auster, Donna Tartt, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón; purely as literature, it feels like an heir to the searching human nuance of the novels of Gabriel García Márquez . . . Javier Marías is the real deal . . . Mesmerizing." --USA Today

"The book that defines Marías's oeuvre as one of Spain's most celebrated contemporary writers . . . Marías creates a symphony." --Boston Globe

"A demonstration of what fiction at its best can achieve." --Hari Kunzru, The Guardian

"A major work from a global talent, Thus Bad Begins knits Hitchcockian suspense into a hypnotic tale crackling with erotic tension and political strife." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Erudite, strange, hypnotic, and beautiful . . . One reads Javier Marías for his ability to make the smallest parts of the world come alive . . . I found myself most loving the book for its pages of brilliant observations, its musings and its suspenseful elegant voice . . . I could not put it down." --Los Angeles Times

"'Rear Window' in Madrid . . . Thus Bad Begins delivers all of Marías's trademark qualities--chewy philosophical meditation, prose of fastidious elegance, and the suspense of an old-fashioned potboiler . . . It's now clear that Margaret Jull Costa and Javier Marías have forged one of the most fruitful author-translator partnerships in current literature." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Fascinating . . . Hypnotic . . . As de Vere and Muriel try to get to the heart of matters, they discover secrets they wish they hadn't . . . but the reader will devour every exquisitely wretched revelation." --TIME

"I read the final pages in full thrall of Marías's novelistic power . . . I was reminded too that Marías is a master of a kind of suspense that is rare in the modern novel." --Karan Mahajan, New York Times Book Review

"Marías is the leading light of a generation of Spanish novelists . . . Thus Bad Begins has lots to say about the political and social changes that have shaped Marías's outlook. It's also a kind of tragedy in comic form, or perhaps the other way round . . . Marías never seems seriously troubled by the long list of technical challenges he has to tackle to develop all this. With immense adroitness, he makes sure that Eduardo isn't simply a wronged husband or a vengeful sadist and keeps Beatriz from turning into a doormat, a hysteric, or a vamp, and thereby maintains the reader's sympathy for both." --Christopher Tayler, Harper's

"On the surface, the novel is part detective caper and part domestic drama. [But] Thus Bad Begins isn't merely a novel about specific characters and their specific scandals; rather, they are stand-ins for the universal . . . If novels can be calls to action, then this one is a clarion for open dialogue." --Village Voice

"Javier Marías captures his nation's long-lasting trauma . . . In Madrid of 1980, the setting for Thus Bad Begins, an entire country finds itself at a crossroads . . . Each of Marías's characters must decide how much is worth forgiving and how much might be worth forgetting." --Washington Post

"Javier Marías has entered that rarefied space in which a writer becomes essential to society. He is a critical conscience who can express what philosophers and political scientists can't.... Thus Bad Begins is a novel, of course, but it could be perfectly read, too, as a beautiful, savage essay on hypocrisy." --Álvaro Enrigue, Publishers Weekly

"Enticing and absolutely addictive . . . Marías is a writer of formidable skills and achievement." --Washington Times

"In highly respected Spanish novelist Marías's new work, we quickly see that political tensions have continued to reverberate [from the Spanish Civil War] . . . Marías reveals how insidiously oppression skews personal lives and relationships year after year." --Booklist

"Marías's marvelously idiosyncratic sentences achieve a dazzling textual equivalent of life's endless complexity. Another challenging, boundary-stretching work from Marías, complete with a jaw-dropping last-chapter revelation." --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Marías's latest resumes his trademark themes of the quest for truth and the haunting presence of Spain's civil war . . . It wallops audiences with some startling twists." --Library Journal

"A novel that teases, tantalises, entertains, and is easily as engrossing as anything he's written before . . . Marías manages to tread the tightrope between a very literary fiction and an absorbing plot; the book dangles the promise of dark, sexual secrets revealed, even as it draws you into a contemplation of the wrenching dilemmas that have shaped modern Spain." --Siobhan Murphy, The Times

"Marías is Spain's own modern-day Cervantes . . . His style is less showy than Umberto Eco's, and wittier and more playful than Elena Ferrante's." --Robert Collins, The Sunday Times

"A simply unputdownable psychological and erotic and political thriller." --Amanda Craig, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review

"One of Marías's most enjoyable and accessible novels." --Luke Brown, Financial Times

"A ferociously addictive, troubling, seductive read . . . I was gripped by every word." --Emma Townshend, Independent on Sunday

"Hypnotic . . . There's a slow-building sense of Hitchcock in Vertigo mode that keeps us engaged." --Lee Langley, The Spectator

"Magnificent." --John Harding, Daily Mail

"Never less than seamlessly elegant . . . As brilliantly well conceived and emotionally profound as one has come to expect from this master." --Rosemary Goring, The Herald (Scotland)