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Darwin's Ghosts
  • Published: 24 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781609809874
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $38.00

Darwin's Ghosts

A Novel

Formats & editions
EBook
6 Nov 2018
Paperback
24 Mar 2020
Hardback
15 Apr 2018
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The first novel in 17 years from one of Latin America's greatest living writers, now available in paperback format, explores the colonial past of a young man whose identity is suddenly called into question.

From the author of Death and the Maiden and other works that explore relations of power in the postcolonial world, comes the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him, leading him to uncover his ancestors' involvement in the sordid story behind 19th century human zoos in Europe.

On Fitzroy Foster's fourteenth birthday on September 11th, 1981, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome gift: as his father snaps his picture with a Polaroid, another person's image appears in the photo. Fitzroy, together with his feisty childhood sweetheart, sets out on a voyage to discover this stranger's identity, in a journey that will take him into the darkest past of his own family history and on an epic sea adventure. In order to recover his own identity, he must unearth the forgotten stories of indigenous men, women, and children who were stolen from their homes and paraded around 19th century Europe like circus monkeys. Ariel Dorfman seamlessly weaves fact and fiction in Darwin's Ghosts, a poignant, mournful cry for those whose travails have been long forgotten, and a lesson in the power of empathy and memory, and the value of forgiveness.
  • Published: 24 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9781609809874
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $38.00
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About the author

Ariel Dorfman

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum (Other Press, 2023), Allegro (Other Press, 2025), Widows, and Konfidenz (Other Press, 2026), and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El País, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende’s chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
portrait photo of Ariel Dorfman

Also by Ariel Dorfman

What She Saw
Konfidenz
Allegro
The Suicide Museum
The Rabbits' Rebellion
Exorcising Terror
Manifesto for Another World
See all

Praise for Darwin's Ghosts

"The novel is much more than a Kafkaesque meditation. It's a thriller, mystery, ghost story and sea adventure ... Like early Hemingway, Dorfman's language is absolutely clear and restrained; like Kafka and Auster, the images are potent yet eerily disembodied." --Andrew Madigan, The Guardian
"It is no surprise that a writer with Dorfman's skill and brilliance would use an act of imagination as a means of inquiry into the very soul of Euro-American culture ... Darwin's Ghosts is dizzying in the best ways. It is a presence. Open the book and the ghosts manifest. ... A marvel of a novel" --Deena Metzger, Tikkun
"Dorfman's clever, thought-provoking premise serves as the medium for a probing examination of power--as well as a daring attempt to distill the nature of good and evil." --Kirkus Reviews