Javier Marias
QUANDO FUI MORTAL
(WHEN I WAS MORTAL)

Victims of mistaken identity, sponging relatives, amateur sleuths, eavesdroppers, professional liars, assassins, and failed bodyguards populate the short stories in When I Was Mortal. Plots turn on curious exigencies—a woman about to star in her first porn film; a night doctor who adds new meaning to "specialist"; a ghost whose neglect is greatly resented. "In the space of ten or twenty pages," as the Nouvel Observateur remarked, "Marías contrives to fits Marías like a glove," as Le Point noted, and these stories have been acclaimed as "dazzling" (The London Times Literary Supplement); "formidably intelligent" (The London Review of Books); and "startling" (The New York Times Book Review).

Marguerite Yourcenar
LE LABYRINTHE DU MONDE
Souvenirs pieux Archives du Nord Quoi? L’Eternite

The first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. Her most ambitious project, it too inspired by the dreams of her adolescence, came about in the three volumes of the
Labyrinthe du monde, memoirs of a new kind in which the author explores her filiation and the history of her ancestors and parents. The first two volumes closed, like two halves of a
shell, around the vision of a little Marguerite, barely a few months old, asleep on her nanny's knees. In the third volume she barely reached the age of puberty. Published posthumously,
this final chapter was never completed.

Jostein Gaarder
KABBALMYSTERIER
(THE SOLITARY MISTERY)

A chance meeting on the Fijian island of Taveuni is the trigger for a fascinating and mysterious novel that intertwines the stories of John Spooke, an English author who is grieving for his dead wife; Frank Andersen, a Norwegian evolutionary biologist estranged from his wife,Vera; and an enigmatic Spanish couple, Ana and Jose, who are absorbed in their love for each other. Their stories are so strewn with mysteries and illusions that it is hard to say where one ends and the next begins, or if the accounts the characters give of themselves can be believed. Why does Ana bear such a close resemblance to the model for
Goya's famous Maja paintings? As the action moves from Fiji to Spain, from the present to the past, unfolding further stories within the stories, the novel reveals an astonishing richness
and complexity.
Maya debates and unravels the questions that give meaning to the lives of the characters – and to our own. At the same time it explores our ideas of the necessity for love. As bold and imaginative in its sweep as Sophie's World, it shows again that Jostein Gaarder's unique and special gift is to make us wonder the awe-inspiring mystery of the universe.

Andrew Crumey
PFITZ

This novel begins two centuries ago in a country whose prince directs the theoretical creation of the city Rreinnstadt, the prince's subjects having planned every element of a true-to-life city.Meanwhile, a cartographer named Schenck works to capture the heart of the beautiful and possibly mad biographer Estrella by writing the story of the eponymous Pfitz's travels in Rreinnstadt. As Schenck becomes closer to Estrella and searches for the story of Pfitz and Spontini (a created writer and Rreinnstadt inhabitant), he is warned by one of Spontini's creators of life-threatening danger: he must distinguish the sane from the insane, the psychopathic lie from the truth, and his loving-dream creation from sorrowful reality. Crumey, author of Music in a Foreign Language (LJ 10/1/96), a Saltire Best First Book Prize winner, is a captivating storyteller who innovatively weaves together several plotlines with philosophical attention to the writer-reader relationship. Recommended for literary collections.
Myah Evers, "Library Journal"