Tomás Nevinson

Starred review from August 21, 2023
This richly layered posthumous outing from Marías (The Infatuations) applies his long-held interest in memory and history to a top-notch literary thriller. In 1997, ex-spy Tomás Nevinson is eking out a quiet retirement in Madrid and making the best of what remains of his marriage, when he is called back into the field by his old MI6 handler, Bertie Tupra. Dispatched to the backwater town of Ruán in northwestern Spain in the guise of schoolteacher Miguel Centurion, Nevinson must find Magdalena Orue O’Dea, a member of the IRA working with the Basque Separatists, who is wanted for her role in a notorious bombing. Bertie suspects she’s one of three women: a restaurateur with a taste for cocaine, a seemingly too-perfect mother of twin children, or the vivacious wife of a scheming local politico. Acting on Bertie’s intel, Nevinson sets about lying and seducing his way into each of their lives as political violence mounts in both Basque Country and Northern Ireland, all of which Marías depicts with kinetic pacing. Even more captivating is Nevinson’s soul-searching as he wonders if he’s still up to the task of being an assassin: “The only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done is to keep doing the same thing.” This modernist masterpiece is the perfect capstone to Marías’s brilliant career.