Javier Marías - Berta Isla

"Berta Isla" is the story of a woman who waits and transforms.
The story of an imperfect love, as all loves are.

Berta Isla and Tomás Nevinson met very young, in Madrid, and quickly decided to spend the rest of their lives together. They couldn't guess, as students at the dawn of adulthood, that the future held for them an intermittent relationship, punctuated by a disappearance.

Berta married Tomás thinking she had known him forever, convinced she had found her destiny. But, in reality, she knew nothing truly important about him.

Tomás hid something from her that he couldn't share with anyone, not even her. During his time as a student at Oxford, an accident on a stupid day changed everything and conditioned his life forever, and Berta's as well.

"Berta Isla" is the story of a man who wants to intervene in History, ending up banished from the world. And it is the story of a woman who waits for a full life and, in that waiting, is transformed. Above all, it is a story of the fragility and tenacity of a relationship condemned to secrecy, pretense, and misunderstanding; a love story in which loyalty and resentment intertwine.
"Every beating heart is a secret to the nearest heart, the one that slumbers and beats beside it," wrote Dickens. And that is the story of all love relationships.