INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ● From the bestselling author of New Day Dawning comes a touching novella of the unrelenting force of love, the power of healing, and the invincible desire to dream ● Inspired by the lives of two World War II survivors In their early teens, two girls were forced to sit next to each other in school. Although they were complete opposites-one a social butterfly and the other a withdrawn bookworm-they soon realized that they shared similar hopes and dreams. Over time, against all expectations, they became best friends. Until the war broke out. Now, each was thrown into opposite sides of the conflict. And mistakes were made-unforgivable mistakes, that would shape both their futures. How could their friendship endure? BASED ON A REMARKABLE TRUE STORY, with an appendix including authentic WWII photographs and documents. "Wonderful... A wry, sharply observed tale of both heroism and coming-of-age-story during one of the darkest times in humanity." "Compulsively readable... In this 200-page novella Kis-Lev proves to be yet again a distinctively contemporary literary voice." "Biting, brilliant exploration of a female friendship. And though The Two Marias focuses on young women, readers need be neither young nor female in order to enjoy it..." * * * * BOOK EXCERPT (c) All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission: PROLOGUE Maria stood at the train station. It was spring, finally. The war was now over. How long she had been waiting for this moment! Her hands fidgeted on her purse. She bit her lip. She missed her friend so intensely. And now she was finally coming. The poor girl... Who could have imagined that things would turn out this way... Maria took a deep breath and bit her lips again. She shook her head disapprovingly at herself. "You should stop this!" she thought, "It's not ladylike biting your lips like that!" She folded her hands together. "Oh God, bring her here already!" * At the same time, on the train entering the country, a young woman sat looking through the window. The war was over. And now she could finally return to her beloved city. To her beloved city square, to the famous fountain in front of the city hall. To the many doves there. To the sound of the trams driving slowly on the old streets. To the theatre. To the ballet. But more than anything, she could finally return to Maria. The train stopped at the border. She sat up as the border police officers passed in the aisle. She smiled at the officer and handed him her identification papers. Before the war, one ID was enough. But nowadays, one had to carry multiple forms of identification. The officer looked at the photo and then at her, "Maria?" She nodded, her face revealing nothing. "Date of birth?" "January 22nd," she said calmly, "1920." "What was the purpose of your stay abroad?" She paused. * * * * END OF EXCERPT (To read further click on the book cover, where you can read more using the Look Inside Feature!)

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST • From the award-winning, internationally bestselling Spanish author of A Heart So White comes an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder. "Sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent ... Marías [has] a penetrating empathy."—The New York Times Book Review Each day before work María Dolz stops at the same café. There she finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Observing their seemingly perfect life helps her escape the listlessness of her own. But when the man is brutally murdered and María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, what began as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement. Invited into the widow's home, she meets—and falls in love with—a man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly encased in a metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, chance and coincidence, and above all, with the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.

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 reader 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.

​​WINNER OF THE IMPAC DUBLIN AWARD • Widely considered a masterpiece, a breathtaking novel about family secrets that chronicles the relentless power of the past—from the award-winning author of The Infatuations and "Spain's best writer" (Roberto Bolaño, national bestselling author of The Savage Detectives). Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into shadows and onto the costs of ambivalence.

An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe).

On the morning of January 23, 1870, troops of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry attacked a Piegan Indian village on the Marias River in Montana Territory, killing many more than the army’s count of 173, most of them women, children, and old men. The village was afflicted with smallpox. Worse, it was the wrong encampment. Intended as a retaliation against Mountain Chief’s renegade band, the massacre sparked public outrage when news sources revealed that the battalion had attacked Heavy Runner’s innocent village—and that guides had told its inebriated commander, Major Eugene Baker, he was on the wrong trail, but he struck anyway. Remembered as one of the most heinous incidents of the Indian Wars, the Baker Massacre has often been overshadowed by the better-known Battle of the Little Bighorn and has never received full treatment until now. Author Paul R. Wylie plumbs the history of Euro-American involvement with the Piegans, who were members of the Blackfeet Confederacy. His research shows the tribe was trading furs for whiskey with the Hudson’s Bay Company before Meriwether Lewis encountered them in 1806. As American fur traders and trappers moved into the region, the U.S. government soon followed, making treaties it did not honor. When the gold rush started in the 1860s and the U.S. Army arrived, pressure from Montana citizens to control the Piegans and make the territory safe led Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan to send Baker and the 2nd Cavalry, with tragic consequences. Although these generals sought to dictate press coverage thereafter, news of the cruelty of the killings appeared in the New York Times, which called the massacre “a more shocking affair than the sacking of Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita” two years earlier. While other scholars have written about the Baker Massacre in related contexts, Blood on the Marias gives this infamous event the definitive treatment it deserves. Baker’s inept command lit the spark of violence, but decades of tension between Piegans and whites set the stage for a brutal and too-often-forgotten incident.

A book by Spain's greatest living writer weaves fiction and fact into a completely original and unforgettable hybrid. Called by its author a "false novel," Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his witty and sardonic 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls is a book Marías swears to be fiction, but which its "characters"--the real-life dons and professors and bookshop owners who have "recognized themselves"--fiercely maintain to be a roman à clef. With the sleepy world of Oxford set into fretful motion by a world that never "existed," Dark Back of Time begins an odyssey into the nature of identity and of time. Marías weaves together autobiography, a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost in Mexico.