Berta Isla

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This is not a novel about spycraft, the drama of going undercover, or even – despite much allusion to the subject – the moral choices attending the profession of secret agent (we never find out what Tomás’s work actually entails, so it’s impossible to know what moral boundaries he may or may not transgress). Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires.

Marías, who’s long had a reputation as your favorite author’s favorite author, has lately earned himself a growing readership in the States, and Berta Isla is certainly likely to help the cause. The espionage premise is initially enticing, but the real draw is the depth of Marías’s characterization.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. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas. The couple first meet during Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s as students at secondary school in Madrid.

Marías transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel .While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages. After Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-longlisted Warlight and Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, Javier Marías’s new book is the latest literary novel to take an unexpected approach to the espionage-thriller formula, mixing marital intrigue with a history lesson of late 20th-century conflict.