"Brilliant. . . . An entertaining and intelligent novel." --The Washington Post

"The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature." --Boston Sunday Globe

"Marías is simply astonishing." --The Times Literary Supplement

"Marías is one of the best contemporary writers." --J. M. Coetzee

"A great writer." --Salman Rushdie

"One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize is Javier Marías." --Orhan Pamuk

"Stylish, cerebral...Marías is a startling talent...His prose is ambitious, ironic, philosophical, and ultimately compassionate." --The New York Times

"His prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility." --The New Yorker

"Javier Marías is such an elegant, witty and persuasive writer that it is tempting simply to quote him at length." --The Scotsman

"Marías uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being." --W. G. Sebald

"His prose possesses an exquisite, almost uncanny observation, recreating moments and moods in hypnotic depth." --The Telegraph

"Javier Marías is a novelist with style . . . His readers enter, through him, a strikingly and disturbingly foreign world." --Margaret Drabble

"A supreme stylist." --The Times

"Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned speculative prose we associate with Proust and Henry James. . . . But he also deals in violence, historical and personal, and in the movie titles, politicians, and brand-names and underwear we connect with quite a different kind of writer." --The London Review of Books