No sooner does he decline than he’s hauled in by police, after a woman he’s been sleeping with is found strangled hours after their last meeting.

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. Both characters first fall in love as youngsters while in high school, but once they are married, Tomás’s schooling will take him to Oxford for a doctoral degree in foreign languages.When Berta takes over sections of the narration, she expresses herself in the same voice, with its tendency towards repetition and digression. Peter Wheeler, who recruits Tomás, and Bertie Tupra, his handler, play significant roles in the other books.

Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires. Elegant … Persuasively vivid … Marías knows that espionage depends on lies and weasely versions of the truth; that sometimes the false stories used to bait the enemy are as important as James Bond heroics. Berta also shares the novel’s general astonishment at the unknowability and likely insignificance of everything. 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.

Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. 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. 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. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas.