The Impostor: A True Story by Javier Cercas

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Who is Enric Marco? An elderly man in his nineties, living in Barcelona, a Holocaust survivor who gave hundreds of speeches, granted dozens of interviews, received important national honors, and even moved government officials to tears. But in May 2005, Marco was exposed as a fraud: he was never in a Nazi concentration camp. The story was reported around the world, transforming him from hero to villain in the blink of an eye. Now, more than a decade later–in a hypnotic narrative that combines fiction and nonfiction, detective story and war story, biography and autobiography–Javier Cercas sets out to unravel Marco’s enigma. With both profound compassion and lacerating honesty, Cercas takes the reader on a journey not only into one man’s gigantic lie, but also–through its exploration of our infinite capacity for self-deception, our opposing needs for fantasy and reality, our appetite for affection–into the deepest, most flawed parts of our humanity.

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