Dark Back of Time

Description

An extraordinary novel, which meditates on the transience, chance and fragility of life, and the way in which reality blurs into fiction '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, and the way in which reality blurs into fiction. As a man called Javier Marias 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.

Javier Marias was born in Madrid in 1951. He is the author of sixteen works in Spanish, which have been translated into forty-two languages including English. His translated English works are All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, When I Was Mortal, Dark Back of Time, The Man of Feeling, Voyage Along the Horizon, Written Lives, the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Fever and Spear, Dance and Dream, and Poison, Shadow and Farewell), Bad Nature, While the Women Are Sleeping and The Infatuations. Javier Marias has received numerous literary prizes including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Formentor, and he is the King of Redonda. He lives and works as a translator and columnist in Madrid, and his forthcoming novel Thus Bad Begins will be published by Hamish Hamilton in March 2016.

Dark Back of Time is one of the best Spanish novels of the twentieth century * Julia Ortega, Brown University * It leaves you with an impression of having been haunted: the most complex, perfect and outstanding of Marias' novels * Reforma * Neither essay nor novel, Javier Marias' most recent book is, quite simply, magnificent. As a book, it is funny, even hilarious, and at times profound, obsessive, and overwhelming. * Le Monde * The author knows how to dive into the formidable chasms of life, fate and death * El Pais * I was enthralled by his strange mix of made-up memories, lost experiences and real-life fantasies -- Marina Warner * Guardian * Shows sensitivity in exploring an entire shadowland of human experience just beyond the reach of words, and could be said to be a culminating point in the author's career * The Times Literary Supplement *