Venice, An Interior

An essential companion for every traveller to Venice, this is the hidden city revealed in a gorgeous non-fiction account by one of Europe's greatest living writers, Javier Marías

'Venice is a hypercity. Here the narrow becomes wide, the near becomes far, the timeless becomes transient, the limited becomes infinite . . . '

Venice is a place of fascinating contradictions, equally full of glamour and chaos. It has a unique romantic appeal that lingers in the imagination, attracting millions of travellers each year, and yet truly native Venetians are a secretive, elusive tribe.

As a young man, Javier Marías briefly made his home in Venice. Since then he has left and returned to the city many times, exploring it over the course of more than thirty years. With characteristic thoughtfulness and elegance, he sets out to uncover the heart of this strange and enchanting place.

About the Author

Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She has won various prizes for her work, including, in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias , and, most recently, the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago.