“By far Spain’s best writer today.”
--Roberto Bolaño
“Stylish, cerebral…Marías is a startling talent…His prose is ambitious, ironic, philosophical, and ultimately compassionate.”
--The New York Times
“Dazzling…. Javier Marías writes with elegance, with wit and with masterful suspense.”
--The Times Literary Supplement
“The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature.”
--Boston Sunday Globe

by Javier Marías
Published in 2013 by Vintage International

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.

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