The Garden of Secrets - Tapa dura

?This work deserves the highest recognition? no-one can deny Juan Goytisolo is the main Spanish novelist on active service? Carlos Fuentes ?A beautifully written metaphor for what it means to seek out the truth in a world often dominated by lies? The Garden of Secrets reminds us that this author, now 70 years of age, is one of the most brilliant of living writers? Los Angeles Times ?Goytisolo?s extraordinary lyrical and imaginative gifts are simultaneously forceful and beguiling, and the only response is to give in to the tumultuous, hallucinatory voices? Observer ?Goytisolo writes like no-one else except maybe Genet; with rigour, anguish, the blackest humour ? and a keen eye for masculine (preferably uniformed) beauty ? Gay Times ?Fantastically imaginative and intensely moral? Scotsman ?The best thing since sliced tortilla? The Times ?Spain?s greatest iconoclast smashes the mirror of narrative, magically reassembles it and teleports the reader into a looking-glass world? Mary Flanagan

Over three weeks twenty-eight story-tellers - one for each letter in the Arabic alphabet - meet in a Marrakesh garden to tell the story of a poet, Eusebio, arrested in Melilla in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Eusebio, a friend of Garcia Lorca and his Circle, escapes assassination and his life then escapes the control of a single destiny. Some tales embroider his shadowy life with stories from Djemaa-el-Fna - the pasha's cook, the slave-market, Aysha and the stork... Does Eusebio betray his Fascist friends by confessing in a show-trial that they indulged in orgies with the youngsters from their battallions? Does he transform into Eugenio the world war two black marketeer from Tangiers? Or does he transmute into the world of Alphonse van Worden, doyen of Marrakesh queens with his Rolls, Indian chauffeur and home showings of Mary Pickford movies? The reader has the final kaleidoscope version thanks to the violent,parodic, erotic images and language of an author invented by the story-tellers. In his latest book, Juan Goytisolo tells a moving story as he reflects on memory, history and the mythical power of fiction.