WINNER OF SPAIN’S NATIONAL CRITICS AWARD • 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. Upon graduation, because of his great ability to speak many languages and imitate many accents, he is recruited by the British secret service and thus begins his life as an underground agent. Their conviction that they are meant to be together is particularly striking in a book that so often asserts our powerlessness over our fate and questions our basis to make judgments about anything. Marías succeeds in creating his own fictional world … He continues to validate his well-deserved global reputation.

See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down.Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. Mesmerising, mysterious, provocative, witty and profound, it is a good place to start with this genius. A bestselling author in his native Spain, Marías is often mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel prize.

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.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. Deceit and arbitrary power are the dynamos of this dense, compelling novel by one of Europe’s most admired authors … Time reading and thinking about it will be well-spent. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. 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. 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. When Berta takes over sections of the narration, she expresses herself in the same voice, with its tendency towards repetition and digression.

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. Tomás 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.