Like a Fading Shadow: A Novel

A hypnotic novel intertwining the authorÆs past with James Earl RayÆs 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 mediaÆs confusion about his location and his image on the FBIÆs 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 Mu±oz Molina reconstructs RayÆs 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 Mu±oz MolinaÆs 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 Mu±oz 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 personÆs eyes. Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.

• | Author: Antonio Mu±oz Molina
• | Publisher: Picador
• | Publication Date: Jul 17, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 320 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback/Fiction
• | ISBN-10: 1250182433
• | ISBN-13: 9781250182432