The impostor

Here is a fascinating non-fiction novel saturated with fiction; the fiction is not put there by the author: it is put there by Enric Marco.

2016 European Book Award.

Who is Enric Marco? A ninety-year-old from Barcelona who posed as a survivor of the Nazi camps and was unmasked in May 2005, after having presided over the Spanish association of survivors for three years, given hundreds of lectures, granted dozens of interviews, received important distinctions and, in some cases, moved Spanish parliamentarians to tears when they gathered to pay tribute for the first time to the republicans deported by the Third Reich.

The case went global and made Marco the great impostor and the great pariah. Now, almost a decade later, Javier Cercas, in this hypnotic thriller that is also a banquet with many dishes - narration, chronicle, essay, biography and autobiography - besieges the enigma of the character, his truth and his falsehoods, and, through this investigation that spans almost a century of Spanish history, delves with kamikaze passion and heartbreaking honesty into the deepest parts of ourselves: into our infinite capacity for self-deception, into our conformism and our lies, into our insatiable thirst for affection, into our contrasting needs for fiction and reality, into the most painful areas of our recent past.

The result is a book that does not speak of Enric Marco but of you, the reader; also Javier Cercas' most rebellious and radical book: an astonishing book that, with unprecedented audacity, expands the limits of the novelistic genre and explores the last frontiers of our humanity.

Multi-award winning novel:

In Italy:

* Premio El Ceppo di Pistoia

* Premio de Pordenone «La storia in un romanzo»

In Beijing:

* Award for the Best Foreign Novel of the Year

In Spain:

* «Archbishop Juan San Clemente» Award

Review:
«Fiction has replaced reality in the world we live in and the mediocre characters of the real world do not interest us. The fabulists do.»
Mario Vargas Llosa