When the author wrote All Souls , he was unprepared for the way in which reality would begin to invade his fiction. This book uses the unsettling effects of All Souls on his life to begin an extraordinary meditation on the transience, chance and fragility of life, and the way in which reality so easily blurs into fiction.

When Javier Marias wrote All Souls , he was unprepared for the way in which reality would begin to invade his fiction. Real people mistook themselves for his fictional characters and readers confused him with his narrator. In Dark Back of Time , Marias uses the unsettling effects of All Souls on his life to begin an extraordinary meditation on the transience, chance and fragility of life, and the way in which reality so easily blurs into fiction. This brilliantly digressive, constantly surprising book moves seamlessly from virtuoso storytelling to intimate autobiography. In doing so, it shows us how the writer is both a keeper of memories and, himself, destined to be lost in the dark back of time.

'Javier Marías is in my opinion one of the best contemporary writers' J.M. Coetzee '[I am] enthralled by his strange mix of made-up memories, lost experiences and real-life fantasies.' Marina Warner, Guardian * Winner of the Dublin IMPAC prize for A Heart So White. '[Dark Back of Time] shows sensitivity in exploring an entire shadowland of human experience just beyond the reach of words, and could be said to represent a culminating point in its author's long career' Times Literary Supplement 'It is a rare gift, to be offered a writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity of the past, who comes with the extra richness lent by foreign history and nonetheless knows our own culture inside out' New York Times 'Witty, readable, moving and insistently thought-provoking...in the manner of Sebald' Irish Independent 'Dark Back of Time brings us a writer who is prepared to set up his apparatus and conduct the narrative experiment in broad daylight, without the benefit of smoke and mirrors' Scotland on Sunday 'He uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being' W.G. Sebald