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.