Berta Isla

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Tom now embarks on a double life, posing as an embassy employee and raising a family in Madrid with Berta while frequently travelling abroad to take part in undercover operations. With meticulous insight and understanding of the human soul, Marías examines the urge to change our destiny, and the hopeless exile we bring upon ourselves. By the time the climax swings back to his perspective, with Tomás finally emerging from deep cover, it’s moot whether his high-minded defence has survived, as Marías’s trademark long sentences – stories in themselves, undoing facts even as they’re stated – unspool a twisty, thought-provoking tale that puts notions of truth and morality under pitiless scrutiny. Marías transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel . I still clung to the idea that England was different,” she says, reading up on Northern Ireland, as her anticolonialist instincts rub up against a fear that Tomás, who reluctantly admits he’s a spy without saying where or how, might become the latest high-profile British scalp.

See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. The intelligence services – the exact branch is never made clear – use the murder accusation as a means to entrap Tom in a career as an infiltrator.Tomás is the prime suspect, unless, that is, he happens to have changed his mind about spying for his adopted country. With peerless insight into the most shadowed corners of the human soul, Marías plunges the reader into the growing chasm between Berta and Tomás and the decisions that irreversibly change the course of the couple’s fate. finest novel to date * Alex Clark * Compelling * Tatler * A twisty, thought-provoking tale that puts notions of truth and morality under pitiless scrutiny * The Guardian * elegant, discursive, persuasively vivid novel. Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires.

Marias weaves a thrilling and desolate meditation on the psychic costs of the deep state's dark arts. Themes, characters and ideas resurface throughout his work, both the standalone novels and the astonishing trilogy ( Your Face Tomorrow). And that strange qualification at the end, “or perhaps some other feline”, sounds bookish and absurd. Alone in the park with their baby son, she’s buttonholed by a pair of Irish diplomats – so they say – who claim Tomás is an MI6 agent “invading” their country, as one of them spills lighter fluid on the baby’s pram, ready to spark up.New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. In the past, he has talked about using his writing to do a special kind of literary thinking, worrying at an idea over a succession of clauses to get at a kernel of truth or exactness.

While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages. Marías’s characters tend to be preoccupied by philosophical and epistemological questions about the nature of reality, rather than their emotions or jobs. For instance, Tomás’s tutor “looked straight at Tomás with his blue eyes slightly narrowed, and so penetrating they were like sparks, as if they could not help scrutinising everything with a degree of suspicion, to the point that the blue seemed to metamorphose into yellow, like the eyes of a sleepy, but very alert lion, or perhaps some other feline”. A stellar student, whose learning of Spanish and English began naturally at home in Madrid, Tomás soon becomes an admired polyglot by his professors at Oxford. Tomás is determined to evade the agent's attentions but his fate is sealed by an escalating series of events that will affect the rest of his life - and that of his beloved Berta.

Marías succeeds in creating his own fictional world … He continues to validate his well-deserved global reputation.

No sooner does he decline than he’s hauled in by police, after a woman he’s been sleeping with is found strangled hours after their last meeting. Berta also shares the novel’s general astonishment at the unknowability and likely insignificance of everything. As a result, identity and deceit take center stage in this narrative along with other recurring topics in Marías’s fiction. Elegant … Persuasively vivid … Marías knows that espionage depends on lies and weasely versions of the truth; that sometimes the false stories used to bait the enemy are as important as James Bond heroics.Their conviction that they are meant to be together is particularly striking in a book that so often asserts our powerlessness over our fate and questions our basis to make judgments about anything.