All Men are Liars

Description

Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death: that of the brilliant South American writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on his balcony floor in Madrid in the mid-1970s. The few accounts of those who knew the deceased - including those of his last lover, a former fellow prison inmate, a sworn enemy and even the author Alberto Manguel himself - are contradictory and unreliable. Poor devil and with a troubled childhood, literary genius and irresistible seducer, ordinary bastard masquerading as hero, pure and simple impostor - those are but a few of the roles attributed to a mysterious and captivating figure in this tribute to falsehood, between the lines of which the reader must discover the only worthwhile truth: that of the fascinating homage Alberto Manguel pays to literature and its shapeshifting inventions, in which the objects of our desires are infinitely reincarnated.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1948, Manguel is a Canadian Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991) for which he won the McKitterick Prize.