LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2018

A TRUE STORY THAT IS PACKED WITH FICTION - FICTION CREATED BY ITS MAIN CHARACTER, ENRIC MARCO

But who is Enric Marco? A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a fighter against fascism, an impassioned campaigner for justice, and a survivor of the Nazi death camps? Or, is he simply an old man with delusions of grandeur, a charlatan who fabricated his heroic war record, who was never a prisoner in the Third Reich and never opposed Franco; a charming, beguiling and compulsive liar who refashioned himself as a defender of liberty and who was unmasked in 2005 at the height of his influence and renown?

In this extraordinary novel - part narrative, part history, part essay, part biography, part autobiography - Javier Cercas unravels the enigma of the man and delves with passion and honesty into the most ambiguous aspects of what makes us human - our infinite capacity for self-deception, our need for conformity, our thirst for affection and our conflicting needs for fiction and for truth.

Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne

"The Impostor is a humane, artistically responsible and civilised book, one that you finish feeling heartened that such a serious-minded writer as Cercas is at work." - Sunday Times

"No Spanish writer has probed the unhealed wounds of the country's history with more subtlety and rigour than Mr Cercas" - Economist

"A fascinating, highly charged, scalpel-sharp dissection." - The Times

"Besides being a piece of nifty journalistic detective work, Cercas' book is an insightful psychological study . . . Both convincing and compelling" - Spectator

"Truth and fiction blend in an outstanding novel about a Holocaust impostor" - Sunday Times "Must Reads"

"[Cercas] goes about telling Marco's story with great skill, some impressive detective work and an irony that's sometimes amused and sometimes appalled" - London Review of Books

"A very rich text, a true textile of interlinked threads of thought, of history and of stories . . . The Impostor is fiction dealing with the value of history; and it is a history about the vital value of fiction as a guarantor of reality" - Bookanista

"Javier Cercas is one of Europe's most serious and attractive writers . . . Cercas is not content with the easy story, in this case the unmasking of a false hero. He boldly searches for the hidden truths of his elusive subject and his times." - Literary Review

"Masterly . . . Cercas probes this mysterious and extraordinary life with uncommon patience, uncommon skill and uncommon sympathy." - Scotsman

"Cercas as added another literary page-turner to his unique oeuvre. He is a master at combining historical truth and fictional viewpoint." - Big Issue

"A fascinating book, very much of our time in this era of fake news and what is called 'historical memories'." - Catholic Herald Books of the Year.

"[A] mesmerizing biography of a fraud . . . This rigorous work shines a light not only on the methods of the deceiver but the willingness of the deceived to accept such falsehoods" - Publishers Weekly

"[The Impostor] vibrates with an insomniac energy . . . it has the hot, charged energy of sitting through a trial . . . The language is precise, distinctive and delicious." - New York Times

"

One of the most accomplished
books I've ever read

"Without doubt, his best novel." - ABC.

"Swift and captivating prose, yet calibrated to the millimetre and?as obsessively rhythmical as ravel's Bolero." - El País.