From one of the most important voices in world literature--and the award-winning author of
The Infatuations--
a darkly comic campus novel and love story about that most British of institutions, Oxford University.
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"Javier Marías is in my opinion one of the best contemporary writers." --J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of
Disgrace
In
All Souls
, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. Yet so much goes into simply "being" at Oxford: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, backstabbing. Marías demonstrates a sweet tooth for eccentricity in this novel from "one of the best contemporary writers" (J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).