It’s happened to us. We notice a couple in a public place exhibiting the slightest degree of affection, and we begin to weave an imaginary life around them without actually knowing anything about them. So much so that sometimes we end up becoming envious of them.

This “commonplace occurrence” lies at the heart of Spanish writer Javier Marías’s The Infatuations. The front cover reveals a happy couple’s kiss reflected on a car’s round mirror. When we turn the pages we meet Maria, who works in book publishing and spends her days surrounded by imaginative stories.

Every morning before she gets to work, she watches Miguel and Luisa Deverne – a seemingly blissful married duo – having breakfast at her favourite cafe. To her, they are a perfect couple and “with lavish agony, she continually daydreams about what it must be like to live their life.” Then suddenly one day they stop showing up. Later, Maria discovers that Miguel has been murdered by a homeless man on the street – the newspaper even carries a photo of his stabbed body.

Soon, a series of coincidences draws her into Luisa’s life; she gets involved with the deceased man’s best friend who, in turn, is infatuated with the newly-widowed Luisa. But, in the midst of this chaos, she stumbles across information that forces her to rethink what happened to Miguel and “a seemingly senseless crime begins making sense.”

The Infatuations is a metaphysical exploration masquerading as a murder mystery. The narrator, the widow and the best friend spend much of the book engaged in conversation, or imagined conversation, or recollected conversation, living simultaneously in a past both real and fantasy, tinged with nostalgia and regret, and a future imbued with suspicion and impossible hopes. Head-clutching stuff, but quietly addictive (The Spectator). A popular literary blog, Bait for Bookworms, called it “The best book Dostoevsky didn’t write.”

Published in 2011. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, published in in 2012.