Marías transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel . Darkly gripping, Berta Isla examines a relationship condemned to secrecy and concealment, to pretence and conjecture, to resentment mingled with loyalty. Full of humour and intelligence … More sinuous and satisfying than many of its precursors … Ranks as Marías’s best novel in years.

Young and in love, they quickly decide to spend their lives together – never suspecting that they will grow to be total strangers, both living under the shadow of disappearances.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. Judging by Javier Marías’s new novel, I dodged a bullet, not least because of the havoc that a career in espionage wreaks on those closest to you. 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. He held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. 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.

George Smiley is perhaps a better model for the twilight realm in which Marías’s characters live … This is an enthralling work … Powerful and indelible. Powerless to influence him, often unable to contact him, Berta’s love and patience are tested over decades, as the turbulence of the 1970s gives way to the Falklands war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. 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. When Berta takes over sections of the narration, she expresses herself in the same voice, with its tendency towards repetition and digression.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.

His work has been translated into forty-three languages and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. The couple first meet during Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s as students at secondary school in Madrid. Mesmerising, mysterious, provocative, witty and profound, it is a good place to start with this genius. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down.Tomas 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 is above all interested in negative states: waiting, uncertainty, insignificance, ignorance, deception and self-deception.