HIDDEN FACES by Salvador Dali Fiction 320 pp. Original Publication Date: 1944, reprint Edition 1987, paperback Edition 1991 Original Publisher: Peter Owen Material Available: finished copies in English and in Italian

‘As far back as 1922 the great poet Garcia Lorca had predicted that I was destined for a literary career and had suggested that my future precisely in the “pure novel”.’ In this book, the only novel by Salvador Dalí and now in its sixth Peter Owen paperback edition, the reader enters the bizarre world already familiar to us from his paintings. Dalí describes, in vividly visual terms, the intrigues and love affairs of a group of dazzling, eccentric aristocrats who, with their luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, symbolize the decadence of the 1930s. The story of the tangled lives of the protagonists, from the February riots of 1934 in Paris to the closing days of the Second World War, constitutes a brilliant and dramatic vehicle for Dalí’s vision and reads as an epitaph of pre-war Europe. ‘Start the first page and you are in the presence of an old-fashioned baroque novel, intelligent, extravagant, as photographically precise as his paintings but not So silly…Dalí notices everything. ’ P.J.Kavanagh, Guardian ‘Flames positively lick from Salvador Dalí’s pages.’ Hilary Spurling, Harpers & Queen ‘What really strikes the reader is the abounding physical detail of objects, light, spaces, or materials.’ The Times ‘So full of visual invention, so witty, so charged with an almost Dickensian energy that it's difficult not to accept its author's own arrogant valuation of himself as a genius.’ George Melly

Translation rights sold: Italian: Mondadori