All Souls (Vintage International)

By one of the most important voices in contemporary world literature, a darkly comic novel about that most British of institutions, Oxford University.

In All Souls, a visiting Spanish lecturer, viewing Oxford through a prismatic detachment, is alternately amused, puzzled, delighted, and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. A bit lonely, not always able to see his charming but very married mistress, he casts about for activity; he barely has to teach. Yet so much goes into simply "being" at Oxford: friendship, opinion-mongering, one-upmanship, finicky exchanges of favors, gossip, adultery, book-collecting, back-patting, backstabbing. Marias demonstrates a sweet tooth for eccentricity in this sly campus novel and love story.