A Heart So White

Juan, a Madrid-based interpreter newly married to Luisa, overhears a half-revealed conversation about his father's first marriage and begins to circle a family secret he is not sure he wants to know. Marías builds the book out of essayistic digressions on translation, marriage, secrets, and the morality of silence, all of them anchored by the opening scene of a young woman shooting herself in the bathroom at a family lunch. The novel works backward and sideways from that scene, asking what one person owes another in the way of truth, and whether knowing makes anything better.