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Berta Isla

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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.

Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires. 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. 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. See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down.Uncommonly powerful, endlessly inventive … Part spy thriller, part murder mystery, part cerebral caper. As is the case with many of Marías’s protagonists, Tomás, or Tom, is an individual of many identities. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves. 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. Elegant … Persuasively vivid … Marías knows that espionage depends on lies and weasely versions of the truth; that sometimes the false stories used to bait the enemy are as important as James Bond heroics.

These, and the name of a young Oxford detective who investigates Tomás - “our diligent Inspector Morse” – suggest another possible twist: perhaps the real master of deception is Marías himself, and his book is simply a potboiler in heavy disguise. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down.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. 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. Tomás is the prime suspect, unless, that is, he happens to have changed his mind about spying for his adopted country. Themes, characters and ideas resurface throughout his work, both the standalone novels and the astonishing trilogy ( Your Face Tomorrow).

The couple first meet during Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s as students at secondary school in Madrid. A man, or woman, who knew how to omit would release a much improved novella from this 544‑page tome. 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. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. 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 transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel . Marías weaves a thrilling and desolate meditation on the psychic costs of the deep state's dark arts. He declines their offer, which is made through his tutor, Peter Wheeler, but then finds himself a suspect in a murder inquiry.

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.With meticulous insight and understanding of the human soul, Marias examines the urge to change our destiny, and the hopeless exile we bring upon ourselves. 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. Here as elsewhere, the translation by Margaret Jull Costa has a lyrical flow, but she can’t rescue this sentence. 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. His preoccupations are overtly literary and the text is studded with references to Shakespeare and TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.

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