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”. How easy it is to be in the dark, or perhaps that’s our natural state,” Berta tells us, twice in the space of seven pages, after another of her husband’s inexplicable absences. At first blush, Berta Isla appears to be a spy thriller in the style of John le Carré … Soon, however, Marías’ trademark webs begin to spread, and the novel becomes an interrogation of language, relationships, and the modern condition. Berta Isla is a companion piece to his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, set in the world of the British intelligence service; many of the themes and some of the characters recur. And that strange qualification at the end, “or perhaps some other feline”, sounds bookish and absurd.

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. At the same time, Berta Isla is a subtle reflection on the nature of fiction and the novel’s ability to serve as a tool to explore the many nuances of human nature. Marías has been touted as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this novel illustrates why. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down.New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. His] stories are always interwoven with deliberations on truth, morality, deceit and the impossibility of knowing one another, with side trips through literature and history … Berta Isla has many of the master’s signature preoccupations … The elegant translation is alive to every nuance … Berta, the desolate wife, is the heart of the story; her first-person narrative eloquently occupies the bulk of the novel … A complex, emotionally torn character, she evolves and matures, and her intimate story carries the book. He declines their offer, which is made through his tutor, Peter Wheeler, but then finds himself a suspect in a murder inquiry. Photograph: Katherine Young/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Sixties Madrid, where Berta and Tomás spend their early married life. 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.

Marías’s intense, sentimentally charged narrative seems to underscore that only the art of the novel is capable of making visible facets of the human condition that seem invisible to the common eye. Unbeknownst to her, he has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services, and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the life they had planned. Marías weaves a thrilling and desolate meditation on the psychic costs of the deep state's dark arts. Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires.

Throughout the book, he enacts his characters’ various degrees of puzzlement in winding digressions about the mists and vapours that obscure our knowledge of each other and ourselves.

The couple first meet during Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s as students at secondary school in Madrid. Having tinkered with the spook-yarn formula in his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Marías strips back the action to stage a dialled-up drama of early motherhood, pitting Berta’s experience against her husband’s in a late-night argument over the kitchen table. Darkly gripping, Berta Isla examines a relationship condemned to secrecy and concealment, to pretence and conjecture, to resentment mingled with loyalty. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers.Marías is above all interested in negative states: waiting, uncertainty, insignificance, ignorance, deception and self-deception. Marías is often praised for his discursive, ruminative style, and has been compared to Henry James, Montaigne, Proust, Laurence Sterne and Sir Thomas Browne – he translated these last two into Spanish. An unexpected approach to the espionage-thriller formula, mixing marital intrigue with a history lesson of late 20th-century conflict … [Also] a dialled-up drama of early motherhood … A twisty, thought-provoking tale that puts notions of truth and morality under pitiless scrutiny. His preoccupations are overtly literary and the text is studded with references to Shakespeare and TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.