Berta Isla

Critics' Award - Dulce Chacón Spanish Narrative Award - Lettura 2018 Award from Il Corriere della Sera (Italy)

Best book of the year according to Babelia (El País).

Selected among the best books of the year in ABC Cultural and La Vanguardia and recommended by El Periódico and La Razón.

An ordinary day, «a stupid day», will condition the rest of her existence.
Berta Isla is the enthralling and passionate story of a waiting.

«For a time she wasn’t sure if her husband was her husband. Sometimes she thought he was, sometimes she thought he wasn’t, and sometimes she decided not to believe anything and to go on living her life with him, or with that man who was like him, older than him. But she too had grown older on her own, in his absence, she was very young when she married.»

Berta Isla and Tomás Nevinson met very young in Madrid, and their determination to spend their lives together came very quickly, without suspecting that an intermittent coexistence and then a disappearance awaited them. Tomás, half Spanish and half English, has a gift for languages and accents, and this leads the Crown to set its sights on him during his studies at Oxford. One ordinary day, «a stupid day» that could have been avoided, will condition the rest of his existence, as well as that of his wife.

Berta Isla is the enthralling and passionate story of a waiting and of an evolution, that of its protagonist. Also of the fragility and tenacity of a loving relationship condemned to secrecy and concealment, to pretense and conjecture, and ultimately to resentment mixed with loyalty.

Or, as a quote from Dickens says towards the end of the book, it is proof that «every beating heart is a secret to the nearest heart, which slumbers and beats beside it». And it is also the story of those who want to stop misfortunes and intervene in the universe, only to find themselves banished from it.

Reviews:
«A wonderful novel. [...] Berta Isla reminds us why fiction, in the hands of its best practitioners, remains the only way to truly know ourselves.»
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Babelia

«Marías has given an extraordinary twist to his own work, achieving a precision, and emotion, and mystery, such as one does not find in a good part of his contemporaries today. Superb.»
Fernando R. Lafuente, ABC Cultural

«Marías has forged a masterpiece [...]. Great literature is once again written in Spanish, to our privilege.»
José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural

«I believe that Berta Isla is one of Marías’s best – perhaps the best – novels. [...] I admire his ability to delve into the deepest reaches of the human being.»
Julia Navarro, ABC Cultural

«Berta Isla is one of the author’s most complex and daring novels and, without a doubt, the most disturbing and desolate.»
José-Carlos Mainer, Babelia

«Authenticity, coupled with narrative talent, is one of Marías’s great virtues. Berta Isla is a magnificent example.»
J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia

«What fits in Berta Isla is us. What drives us and what hurts us. What we don’t know, but suspect.»
Antonio Lucas, El Mundo

«Once again, Javier Marías has forged an exceptional novel. As if installed at a very high level of literary quality, the writer’s talent does not wane or settle for paths already explored.»
Domingo Ródenas, El Periódico