Both lose their virginity to other people: Tom, while he’s at Oxford, studying languages; Berta to a young bullfighter she meets in the street during an anti-government rally. 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. For instance, Tomás’s tutor “looked straight at Tomás with his blue eyes slightly narrowed, and so penetrating they were like sparks, as if they could not help scrutinising everything with a degree of suspicion, to the point that the blue seemed to metamorphose into yellow, like the eyes of a sleepy, but very alert lion, or perhaps some other feline”. Alone in the park with their baby son, she’s buttonholed by a pair of Irish diplomats – so they say – who claim Tomás is an MI6 agent “invading” their country, as one of them spills lighter fluid on the baby’s pram, ready to spark up. He declines their offer, which is made through his tutor, Peter Wheeler, but then finds himself a suspect in a murder inquiry.

His preoccupations are overtly literary and the text is studded with references to Shakespeare and TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. While she’s horrified that – with their shared memory of life under Franco – Tomás could be a tool of state violence, he accuses Berta of naivety over the skulduggery buttressing everyday life: “Why do you think people can live in peace, can get on with their lives, focus on their personal sufferings and hardships… without a thought for anything else? 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. His] stories are always interwoven with deliberations on truth, morality, deceit and the impossibility of knowing one another, with side trips through literature and history … Berta Isla has many of the master’s signature preoccupations … The elegant translation is alive to every nuance … Berta, the desolate wife, is the heart of the story; her first-person narrative eloquently occupies the bulk of the novel … A complex, emotionally torn character, she evolves and matures, and her intimate story carries the book.

Uncommonly powerful, endlessly inventive … Part spy thriller, part murder mystery, part cerebral caper.

Tomás is the prime suspect, unless, that is, he happens to have changed his mind about spying for his adopted country. I still clung to the idea that England was different,” she says, reading up on Northern Ireland, as her anticolonialist instincts rub up against a fear that Tomás, who reluctantly admits he’s a spy without saying where or how, might become the latest high-profile British scalp. Berta, we realise, is becoming something she feared as a schoolgirl: someone whose story “did not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting someone else’s more eventful and interesting life”. Peter Wheeler, who recruits Tomás, and Bertie Tupra, his handler, play significant roles in the other books.Tom now embarks on a double life, posing as an embassy employee and raising a family in Madrid with Berta while frequently travelling abroad to take part in undercover operations. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. Marías has been touted as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this novel illustrates why. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks.