At first blush, Berta Isla appears to be a spy thriller in the style of John le Carré … Soon, however, Marías’ trademark webs begin to spread, and the novel becomes an interrogation of language, relationships, and the modern condition. Themes, characters and ideas resurface throughout his work, both the standalone novels and the astonishing trilogy ( Your Face Tomorrow). 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. 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. With meticulous insight and understanding of the human soul, Marías examines the urge to change our destiny, and the hopeless exile we bring upon ourselves.

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.Marías succeeds in creating his own fictional world … He continues to validate his well-deserved global reputation. An unexpected approach to the espionage-thriller formula, mixing marital intrigue with a history lesson of late 20th-century conflict … [Also] a dialled-up drama of early motherhood … A twisty, thought-provoking tale that puts notions of truth and morality under pitiless scrutiny. Marías transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel . Throughout the book, he enacts his characters’ various degrees of puzzlement in winding digressions about the mists and vapours that obscure our knowledge of each other and ourselves.

Berta also shares the novel’s general astonishment at the unknowability and likely insignificance of everything. 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. Young and in love, they quickly decide to spend their lives together - never suspecting that they will grow to be total strangers, both living under the shadow of disappearances. It is a source of continuing regret to me that I’ve never been approached to be a spy – especially since I came of age during the cold war, speak Russian, and went to boarding school and Cambridge. Marías is often praised for his discursive, ruminative style, and has been compared to Henry James, Montaigne, Proust, Laurence Sterne and Sir Thomas Browne – he translated these last two into Spanish.Judging by Javier Marías’s new novel, I dodged a bullet, not least because of the havoc that a career in espionage wreaks on those closest to you. Marías’s intense, sentimentally charged narrative seems to underscore that only the art of the novel is capable of making visible facets of the human condition that seem invisible to the common eye. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas. Berta Isla is a companion piece to his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, set in the world of the British intelligence service; many of the themes and some of the characters recur. A man, or woman, who knew how to omit would release a much improved novella from this 544‑page tome.

Marías has been touted as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this novel illustrates why. Mesmerising, mysterious, provocative, witty and profound, it is a good place to start with this genius.

A brooding tale of lives darkened by separation and deception … As usual, Marías propels his philosophical debates with the urgency of a thriller, including a bravura plot twist … Skilled and provocative, as always. George Smiley is perhaps a better model for the twilight realm in which Marías’s characters live … This is an enthralling work … Powerful and indelible. 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.