Berta Isla

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Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves.

Both characters first fall in love as youngsters while in high school, but once they are married, Tomás’s schooling will take him to Oxford for a doctoral degree in foreign languages. Truly multicultural and multilingual, he can claim more than one place of belonging while also being perfectly capable of feeling at ease in more than one cultural setting. Themes, characters and ideas resurface throughout his work, both the standalone novels and the astonishing trilogy ( Your Face Tomorrow).

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. 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. Here as elsewhere, the translation by Margaret Jull Costa has a lyrical flow, but she can’t rescue this sentence. 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. While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages.

Uncommonly powerful, endlessly inventive … Part spy thriller, part murder mystery, part cerebral caper. Marías’s characters tend to be preoccupied by philosophical and epistemological questions about the nature of reality, rather than their emotions or jobs. Peter Wheeler, who recruits Tomás, and Bertie Tupra, his handler, play significant roles in the other books. Case in point are the trials and tribulations of love and marriage and, more importantly, the hidden secrets each individual carries during his or her lifetime.

Photograph: Katherine Young/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Sixties Madrid, where Berta and Tomás spend their early married life.

Marías, a celebrated Spanish author, offers up a masterly premise and plot that are worthy of a Hitchcock adaptation, and the denouement does not disappoint.When Berta takes over sections of the narration, she expresses herself in the same voice, with its tendency towards repetition and digression. 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. 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.