When Javier Marias wrote "All Souls", he was unprepared for the way in which reality would begin to invade his fiction. Real people mistook themselves for his fictional characters and readers confused him with his narrator. In "Dark Back of Time", Marias uses the unsettling effects of "All Souls" on his life to begin an extraordinary meditation on the transience, chance and fragility of life, and the way in which reality so easily blurs into fiction. This brilliantly digressive, constantly surprising book moves seamlessly from virtuoso storytelling to intimate autobiography. In doing so, it shows us how the writer is both a keeper of memories and, himself, destined to be lost in the dark back of time.