Like a Fading Shadow, A Novel

Resumen del libro

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 Muñoz 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 Muñoz 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 Muñoz 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.

Biografía del autor

Nació en Úbeda (Jaén) en 1956. Ha reunido sus artículos en volúmenes como El Robinson urbano (1984) o La vida por delante (2002). Su obra narrativa comprende Beatus Ille (1986), El invierno en Lisboa (1987), Beltenebros (1989), El jinete polaco (1991), Los misterios de Madrid (1992), El dueño del secreto (1994), Ardor guerrero (1995), Plenilunio (1997), Carlota Fainberg (2000), En ausencia de Blanca (2001), Ventanas de Manhattan (2004), El viento de la Luna (2006), Sefarad (2001), La noche de los tiempos (2009), Como la sombra que se va (2014), Un andar solitario entre la gente (2018), Tus pasos en la escalera (2019), El miedo de los niños (2020), Volver a dónde (2021), No te veré morir (2023), y el volumen de relatos Nada del otro mundo (2011) y el ensayo Todo lo que era sólido (2013). Ha recibido, entre otros, el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, el Premio Planeta, el Premio Jerusalén, el Prix Médicis Étranger y fue finalista del premio Man Booker International con su novela Como la sombra que se va en 2018. Desde 1995 es miembro de la Real Academia Española. Vive en Madrid y Lisboa y está casado con la escritora Elvira Lindo.