Like a shadow that departs

After Martin Luther King was assassinated, Ray was able to escape with a forged passport, and during his travels from one country to another, he kept following the newspapers happily seeing his name on the list of the "Top Ten Most Wanted Criminals by the FBI." His journey finally brought him to Lisbon, where he spent ten days waiting for an entry visa to Angola. But that Lisbon was also the city that inspired Antonio Munioz Molina's most famous novel, and when he decided now to write a novel about Ray, the city became a witness to three alternating stories: a murderer fleeing from justice, a writer struggling to find his literary voice, and the writer himself, after thirty years, reflecting on his life, his protagonist's life, and the form of the novel in which he tries to imagine the world through the consciousness of another man. In "A Shadow Passing By," which reached the short list for the 2018 Booker Prize, Molina writes a captivating, powerful, and detailed novel, integrating the narrative event with the way of writing about it.