The Garden of Secrets

Description

Twenty-eight storytellers, one for each letter in the Arabic alphabet, meet in a garden in Marrakesh to tell the story of a poet, Eusebio, arrested in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Eusebio, a friend of Federico Garcia Lorca and his Circle, had escaped assassination and fled to North Africa. Goytisolo's storytellers question the nature of memory, history and myth. Tristram Shandy and A Thousand and One Nights are enlisted to show the chameleon nature of truth. In The Garden of Secrets, Juan Goytisolo reminds us that ultimately it is fiction that is the arbiter of truth

Born in Barcelona in 1931, Juan Goytisolo is Spain's greatest living writer. A bitter opponent of the Franco regime, his early novels were banned in Spain. In 1956 he moved to Paris. Since then he has written extensively on the city as melting-pot, the expulsion of the Moors from Europe and the art of reading. His novels include Marks of Identity, Count Julian, Juan the Landless, Landscapes After the Battle and The Virtues of the Solitary Bird. He lives in Morocco.

'The main Spanish novelist on active service' Carlos Fuentes 'Goytisolo's extraordinary lyrical and imaginative gifts...are simultaneously forceful and beguiling' Observer