'Javier Mar-as 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

'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

Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published twenty-three books and been translated into twenty-nine languages, winning a dazzling array of literary awards. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Conrad, Stevenson, Hardy and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.