
Berta Isla
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Frankie Corzo
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Bruce Mann
About this listen
From the award-winning, internationally best-selling Spanish writer, author of The Infatuations, comes a gripping new novel of intrigue and missed chances - at once a spy story and a profound examination of a marriage founded on secrets and lies.
When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson - the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. But when Tomás returns to Madrid from his studies at Oxford, he is a changed man. 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.
With peerless insight into the most shadowed corners of the human soul, Marías plunges the listener into the growing chasm between Berta and Tomás and the decisions that irreversibly change the course of the couple's fate. Berta Isla is a novel of love and truth, fear and secrecy, buried identities, and the destinies we bring upon ourselves.
©2019 Javier Marías (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Marías transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel.... The espionage premise is initially enticing, but the real draw is the depth of Marías’s characterization. This weighty novel rewards readers with the patience for its deliberate dissection of a marriage.” (Publisher’s Weekly)
“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.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas. [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.” (Lee Langley, The Spectator)
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It is the early 1980s and fifteen-year-old Libby is obsessed with The Field Guide to the Trees of North America, a gift from her father before he died. She finds solace in “The Kingdom,” a stand of red oak and mountain laurel near her home in suburban Pennsylvania, where she can escape from her family and share menthols with her best friend. One night, while driving home, Libby’s mother, exhausted with the fighting in the backseat, pulls over and orders Libby’s little sister Ellen to walk home. What none of this family knows as they drive off is what will happen next.
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enjoyable listen
- By Barbara S on 01-23-21
By: Una Mannion
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Hades, Argentina
- A Novel
- By: Daniel Loedel
- Narrated by: Christian Barillas
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?
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Can be overly neurotic without advances.story much
- By Doug Easterling on 05-13-21
By: Daniel Loedel
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The Old Drift
- A Novel
- By: Namwali Serpell
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Grant, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
- Length: 24 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The year 1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond.
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A saga of Africa and African immigrants
- By Books on our Brains Society/ Barbara on 08-02-19
By: Namwali Serpell
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A Pure Heart
- A Novel
- By: Rajia Hassib
- Narrated by: Ariana Delawari
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Sisters Rose and Gameela Gubran could not have been more different. Rose, an Egyptologist, married an American journalist and immigrated to New York City, where she works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gameela, a devout Muslim since her teenage years, stayed in Cairo. During the aftermath of Egypt's revolution, Gameela is killed in a suicide bombing. When Rose returns to Egypt after the bombing, she sifts through the artifacts Gameela left behind, desperate to understand how her sister came to die, and who she truly was.
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The reader ruins it.
- By Barbara on 01-24-20
By: Rajia Hassib
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The Chosen One
- By: Walt Gragg
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 16 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Two months ago, a new leader arose in the Islamic world, the Mahdi - or the Chosen One. He has rallied fundamentalist Muslim forces across the Middle East who have driven deep into Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Standing against them is an allied force made up primarily of the American military. It's a desperate fight. From armored battles in the desert to American carriers desperately dodging waves of cruise missiles, the Mahdi proves to have many tricks up his sleeve.
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Predictable
- By Amazon Customer on 03-25-20
By: Walt Gragg
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Daughter
- By: Claudia Dey
- Narrated by: Ellie Moon, Kristen Thomson, Jonathon Young, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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To be loved by your father is to be loved by God. So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress, and daughter of a man famous for one great novel, a man whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona’s childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken.
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Frill-less
- By Amazon Customer on 10-24-24
By: Claudia Dey
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The Charmed Wife
- By: Olga Grushin
- Narrated by: Karissa Vacker
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Cinderella married the man of her dreams - the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, 13 and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong, and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up and exhausted, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming. Instead, she wants him dead.
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Warning
- By Ijw on 01-26-21
By: Olga Grushin
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Henry, Himself
- A Novel
- By: Stewart O'Nan
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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A member of the greatest generation looks back on the loves and losses of his past and comes to treasure the present anew in this poignant and thoughtful new novel from a modern master.
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Nothing Happens If You're Okay With That 3.5*
- By Sharlotte on 03-06-20
By: Stewart O'Nan
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The Upstairs House
- A Novel
- By: Julia Fine
- Narrated by: Courtney Patterson
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Ravaged and sore from giving birth to her first child, Megan is mostly raising her newborn alone while her husband travels for work. Physically exhausted and mentally drained, she’s also wracked with guilt over her unfinished dissertation - a thesis on mid-century children’s literature. Enter a new upstairs neighbor: the ghost of quixotic children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown - author of the beloved classic Goodnight Moon -whose existence no one else will acknowledge.
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Footnotes were super distracting
- By Anonymous User on 04-03-21
By: Julia Fine
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Olive
- By: Emma Gannon
- Narrated by: Sian Clifford
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Olive is many things. Independent. Driven. Loyal. And a little bit adrift. She’s okay with still figuring it all out, navigating her world without a compass. But life comes with expectations and big choices to be made. So when her best friends’ lives branch away towards marriage and motherhood, leaving the path they’ve always followed together, she starts to question her choices—because life according to Olive looks a little bit different.
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Smart, Relatable, & Engaging
- By S on 01-16-25
By: Emma Gannon
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Foregone
- A Novel
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of 60,000 draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late 70s, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life.
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Wonderful
- By ELIZABETTA on 03-20-21
By: Russell Banks
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Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault
- Essays from the Grown-up Years
- By: Cathy Guisewite
- Narrated by: Cathy Guisewite, Anna Guisewite
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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As the creator of "Cathy", Cathy Guisewite found her way into the hearts of fans more than 40 years ago and has been there ever since. Her hilarious and deeply relatable look at the challenges of womanhood in a changing world became a cultural touchstone for women everywhere. Now, Guisewite returns with her signature wit and warmth in this debut essay collection about another time of big transition, when everything starts changing and disappearing without permission: aging parents, aging children, aging self stuck in the middle.
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Not about work life balance or careers at all
- By Kindle Customer on 08-06-19
By: Cathy Guisewite
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Talk to Me
- A Novel
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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When animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhorn demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught Sam, his juvenile chimp, to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, an undergraduate at Guy's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant. A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we know it. What if it were possible to speak to the members of another species - to converse with them?
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Themes Better Covered Elsewhere
- By Indyquaz on 12-11-21
By: T. C. Boyle
What listeners say about Berta Isla
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Timothy Christenfeld
- 04-26-23
Wonderfully intriguing
An incredibly thoughtful and engaging story about a spy and his wife. Complex, poignant, inner monologues about the impact on their lives rather than the swashbuckling escapades of spydom yet deeply intriguing in its own way. Thoroughly enjoyed it! Great audio production.
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- hans sandberg
- 09-13-19
Good plot, weak psychology
it's an interesting plot, but the characters are one-dimensional. Berta tells most of the story, but it's clearly a man's interpretation of her psychology, and it's not convincing. The philosophical ruminations are only moderately interesting.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Per
- 01-09-25
Not as good as his earlier work
Some of the story is beautifully written. Audiobook is well done. Falls short compared to other novels by JM.
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- Kathleen
- 12-25-19
I am still thinking about Berta Isla...
A look at the espionage life from the point of view of the family left at home, ignorant of the secret agent’s secret. Berta Isla is the girlfriend and then wife, of a man who is destined to enter life with the British Secret service. We see the couple while still young, as students, with their whole lives ahead of them. We catch glimpses of each of them as their separate, and often disparate, lives unfold. And we see them again later on — when the secret life is over, while never actually dying. A haunting story, well written, superbly performed.
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1 person found this helpful
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- S. L. Gold
- 01-16-20
Disappointing Marias
Other than learning about the fascistic recruiting of undercover agents, this book offers little insight into the characters via their 1st person accounts. Yes! one tragic historical incident can destroy entire lives -- a theme of Marias better told in Thus Bad Begins.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Annie Smart
- 09-11-23
Not for me.
Stream of consciousness from 2 characters spouting endlessly repetitive philosophical maunderings that provide little that is surprising or profound. And little actually happens. If the activities that caused the lengthy personal separations, and so the characters' mental pain, were actually described, that might have made for an interesting judgement call. Understanding the on-the-ground actions that infamous world events were causing fairly ordinary individuals to effect could have been very valuable. Instead literally everything is inferred, glossed over, bar one moment where a child is possibly threatened.
I haven't disliked a book quite so much in a long while. So why did I read it all? - I try always to finish any book I've started. Nothing more.
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