All men are liars - Alberto Manguel

Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death: that of the Argentinian writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on the pavement underneath his balcony in Madrid in the mid-1970s. The few accounts of those who knew him - which include those of his last lover, a former fellow prison inmate, a sworn enemy and even the author Alberto Manguel himself - are contradictory and unreliable. Poor devil with a troubled childhood, literary genius and irresistible seducer, ordinary man masquerading as hero, pure and simple impostor - these are but a few facets of a mysterious figure in this tribute to falsehood. Between the lines, the reader must discover the only worthwhile truth: the fascinating homage Alberto Manguel pays to literature and its shape-shifting creations, which give infinite expressions to the objects of our desires.

Alberto Manguel is a Canadian writer, novelist, translator and editor, acclaimed for several award-winning works, including the triumphant A HISTORY OF READING (A TLS International Book of the Year, a GLOBE AND MAIL Notable Book of the Year and winner of France's Prix des Medecis). He was born in Buenos Aires, has lived in Italy, france, England and Tahiti, and he bacame a Canadian citizen in 1985. Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires but moved to Toronto early on in his life. He now lives in France. He is the author of some hugely successful books including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He is a Guggenheim Fellow.

A meticulously constructed and brilliantly executed discourse on the nature of truth and writing... [the author] has managed to create a work that is expertly weighted: at once Latin American in spirit and yet universal in its reach.
The Literary Review

A moving paean to the power of the written word and a condemnation of the repressive powers that so often seek to subvert it.
The Tablet

This playful, ingenious but finally tragic novel invites us... into a labyrinth of rival narratives with an all-too-real monster at its heart.
The Independent

[Manguel's fiction] works from the human core outwards, and is in fact elaborately though unpretentiously constructed.
The Guardian

All Men are Liars is interesting as an exercise in storytelling... but is lifted to excellence by more traditional values: in its sense of place... in its love of characters... in the colloquial roll of its gossip-spun action.
The Guardian

Clever, witty and entertaining; and very timely in a society increasingly accustomed to living in a blizzard of lies.
The Times

All Men Are Liars is a remarkable novel - richly textured, ingeniously constructed and deeply unsettling.
The Spectator

The novel... aims to shed light on the circumstances surrounding [Bevilacqua]'s death, but what it actually achieves is broader and more interesting. The predominant pleasure, as we pass from one narrator to another, is a growing impression (an illusion, perhaps, but a pleasing one) of a man's life coming into focus.
TLS

If Paul Auster wore a friendly beard and had more of a Latin temperament, he might produce something like this richly hued, melancholy and funny puzzle of a novel.
The Guardian