Like a Fading Shadow - Hardcover

Antonio Muñoz Molina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1781258937 ISBN 13: 9781781258934

Publisher: Tuskar Rock, 2017

Synopsis

A hypnotic novel intertwining the author's past with James Earl Ray's attempt to escape after shooting Martin Luther King Jr.

The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media's confusion about his location and his image on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities.

Using recently declassified FBI files, Antonio Munoz Molina reconstructs Ray's final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Munoz Molina's first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now, thirty years later, it becomes the stage for and witness to three alternating stories: Ray in 1968 at the center of an international manhunt; a thirty-year-old Munoz Molina in 1987 struggling to find his literary voice; and the author in the present, reflecting on his life and the form of the novel as an instrument for imagining the world through another person's eyes.

Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.

About this title

About the Author

Antonio Munoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including In the Night of Time (also published by Tuskar Rock), Sepharad, and A Manuscript of Ashes. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including Spain's National Narrative Prize, the Planeta Prize, and the Principe de Asturias Prize. He lives in Madrid and New York City.

Review

Antonio Munoz Molina is a true original and has written a book unlike anything else: part fiction, part memoir, part meditation, in which the interiority of a murderer on the run - and not just any murderer but James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King - is set against the interiority of the writer, when young, trying to find his voice. The stories of the killer and the writer circle each other, interrogate and echo each other, and then diverge. A novel is a kind of refuge too, Munoz Molina suggests. Only one of the two men in this terrific book will find the refuge he seeks. -- Salman Rushdie A master of his craft. * The TLS * Deftly combining the true story of James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King Jr's assassin, on the run in Lisbon, with the recollection of a visit by the author to the Portuguese capital as he researched an early novel, this genre-bending work by one of Spain's most acclaimed authors examines the relationship between history, reportage and fiction. -- Angel Gurria-Quintana * Financial Times Books of the Year * Praise for In the Night of Time: 'Sweeping, magisterial ... an astonishingly vivid narrative that unfolds with hypnotic intensity by means of the constant interweaving of time and memory ... Tolstoyan in its scale, emotional intensity and intellectual honesty * Economist * Exhilarating ... exceptional ... a necessary novel -- Adam Feinstein * Financial Times * An immense, luminous panorama ... one of the many wonders of this novel is how Molina integrates the personal so closely with the political ... compellingly seductive * Independent * A gorgeous English translation ... Antonio Munoz Molina tackles three interlinked narratives like a man playing three instruments simultaneously. As with such a feat, the skill he exhibits appears almost impossible. * Herald Scotland * Mesmerising * Spectator *

Edition details

• Publisher: Tuskar Rock
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1781258937
• ISBN 13: 9781781258934
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320