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Darwin's Ghosts
  • Published: 24 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781609809874
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $35.00

Darwin's Ghosts

A Novel

Formats & editions
EBook
6 Nov 2018
Paperback
24 Mar 2020
Hardback
15 Apr 2018
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The first novel in 17 years from one of Latin America's greatest living writers, now available in paperback format, explores the colonial past of a young man whose identity is suddenly called into question.

From the author of Death and the Maiden and other works that explore relations of power in the postcolonial world comes the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him. Is the sordid story behind human zoos that flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century connected somehow to a boy's life a hundred years later? 
     On Fitzroy Foster's fourteenth birthday on September 11, 1981, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome gift: when his father snaps his picture with a Polaroid, another person's image appears in the photo. Fitzroy and his childhood sweetheart, Cam, set out on a decade-long journey in search of this stranger's identity—and to reinstate his own—across seas and continents, into the far past and the evil and good that glint in the eyes of the elusive visitor. Seamlessly weaving together fact and fiction, Darwin's Ghosts holds up a different light to Conrad's "The horror! The horror!" and a different kind of answer to the urgent questions, Who are we? And what can we do about it?
  • Published: 24 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781609809874
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $35.00
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About the author

Ariel Dorfman

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum (Other Press, 2023), Allegro (Other Press, 2025), Widows, and Konfidenz (Other Press, 2026), and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El País, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende’s chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
portrait photo of Ariel Dorfman

Also by Ariel Dorfman

Konfidenz
Allegro
The Suicide Museum
The Rabbits' Rebellion
Exorcising Terror
Manifesto for Another World
See all

Praise for Darwin's Ghosts

"The novel is much more than a Kafkaesque meditation. It's a thriller, mystery, ghost story and sea adventure ... Like early Hemingway, Dorfman's language is absolutely clear and restrained; like Kafka and Auster, the images are potent yet eerily disembodied." --Andrew Madigan, The Guardian
"It is no surprise that a writer with Dorfman's skill and brilliance would use an act of imagination as a means of inquiry into the very soul of Euro-American culture ... Darwin's Ghosts is dizzying in the best ways. It is a presence. Open the book and the ghosts manifest. ... A marvel of a novel" --Deena Metzger, Tikkun
"Dorfman's clever, thought-provoking premise serves as the medium for a probing examination of power--as well as a daring attempt to distill the nature of good and evil." --Kirkus Reviews

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