From the award-winning, internationally bestselling Spanish writer, an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder.

"Sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent...Marías [has] a penetrating empathy."—New York Times Book Review

Each day before work María Dolz stops at the same café. There she finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Observing their seemingly perfect life helps her escape the listlessness of her own. But when the man is brutally murdered and María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, what began as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement. Invited into the widow's home, she meets--and falls in love with--a man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly encased in a metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, chance and coincidence, and above all, with the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book, NPR Great Reads, and Onion A.V. Club Best Book of 2013