"Dark Back of Time" is a compelling story of the way in which reality blurs into fiction by Javier Marias, 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 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 has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for "A Heart So White". He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. "I was enthralled by his strange mix of made-up memories, lost experiences and real-life fantasies." (Marina Warner, "Guardian"). "He uses language like an anatomist uses a scalpel to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being." (W. G. Sebald, author of "Austerlitz").

Author Biography

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.