From the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of The
Infatuations comes a gripping novel of intrigue and missed chances--at
once a spy story and a profound examination of a marriage founded on
concealment.
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. But when Tomás returns to Madrid
from his studies at Oxford, he is a changed man. Unbeknownst to her, he
has been approached by an agent from the British intelligence services,
and he has unwittingly set in motion events that will derail forever the
life they had planned.
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. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried
identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves.