Dark Back of Time (Penguin Modern Classics)

Dark Back of Time is a compelling story of the way in which reality blurs into fiction by Javier Marías, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. It is translated by Esther Allen in Penguin Modern Classics.

'We lose everything because everything remains except us', says the mysterious narrator of this extraordinary novel, which meditates on the transience, chance and fragility of life. As a man called Javier Marías recalls the strange events and people that shaped his past, including ghostly literary figures, a pilot, an adventurer, a brother who died as a child and the king of an island in the Caribbean, we begin to question the nature of time, memory and reality itself. Here the writer is both a keeper of memories and a purveyor of illusions, destined to be lost in the dark back of time.