Author(s): Enrique Vila-Matas

Contemporary Fiction

Mac over sixty and recently unemployed lives on his wife's earnings from her furniture restoration business. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac's wife, Carmen, a dyslexic born of dyslexic parents, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depression-but Mac persists, and is determined that this diary will not turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a near neighbour, a highly successful author who once wrote a collection of enigmatic, wilfully obscure stories....