Thus Bad Begins
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)
Sometime towards the end of the 1980s, I remember sitting with a group of friends in a bar in Madrid. As dawn broke, one of us said that he really ought to get some sleep. “I’m an eye surgeon,” he explained, “and in three hours I’ve got to do an operation.” The rest of us gulped, raised a glass to the patient and ordered a final round before having breakfast and going to bed.