Juan Goytisolo has been hailed as one of the finest writers currently working in the Spanish language. He has produced a series of passionately iconoclastic and obliquely autobiographical novels, charting the effects of civil war and fascist dictatorship upon his native Spain. In The Garden of Secrets, a Circle of 28 readers, each one represented by a letter of the Arabic alphabet, gather in a garden to tell the story of Eusebio, a dissident poet arrested by the Falange in the early years of the Spanish Civil War. Diagnosed as a victim of "collectivist social utopias" exacerbated by "feminoid urges", the poet is subjected to a brutal programme of drugs, re-indoctrination and electric shock treatment. The narrative which follows is disorientating, nightmarish and fragmentarily beautiful. At the heart of the narrative, a fabric that constantly unravels itself with each successive storyteller, is the enigma of the poet himself. Who is Eusebio? The Islamic convert and ascetic divine of Marrakesh, the bloated black marketeer of Tangiers or a sham aristocrat with a passion for Mary Pickford and a penchant for female impersonation? These myriad identities, constructed by the various narrators (including a brilliant parody of the Arabist scholar), shroud the subject in mystery whilst illuminating the real object of Goytisolo's interest: the process of storytelling itself. After all, the author is yet another "fictitious character, a mere paper being like the one you're laboriously constructing". The Garden of Secrets is a brilliant, mesmerising novel. --Jerry Brotton