Berta Isla

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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.

Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages. 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. Mesmerising, mysterious, provocative, witty and profound, it is a good place to start with this genius. Full of humour and intelligence … More sinuous and satisfying than many of its precursors … Ranks as Marías’s best novel in years.

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. When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson–the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. 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. He declines their offer, which is made through his tutor, Peter Wheeler, but then finds himself a suspect in a murder inquiry.

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. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves. 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.Marias weaves a thrilling and desolate meditation on the psychic costs of the deep state's dark arts. 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.