Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the secret intelligence agency run by his old Oxford friend Bernard Tupra. Deza finds himself increasingly under the spell of his shadowy boss, forced to watch Tupra s collection of incriminating videotapes of important public figures. The recordings document unconventional private lives and horrific acts. The scenes enter him like a poison, contaminating everything good, yet he is powerless to counteract them. Sex and violence are simultaneously grotesque and commonplace- an old man is attacked in a nightclub toilet; Deza has silent one-sided sex with a colleague; his wife is beaten up by her new lover. Set against this background of brutality, Poison, Shadow and Farewell asks whether violence can ever be justified and completes the extraordinary journey that has led us on a descent into hell and a re-emergence, not entirely unscathed, into life. Javier Marias has been called the most significant Spanish writer of his generation and in