Darwin's Ghosts A Novel

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. Is the sordid story behind human zoos that flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century connected somehow to a boy's life a hundred years later? 
     On Fitzroy Foster's fourteenth birthday on September 11, 1981, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome gift: when his father snaps his picture with a Polaroid, another person's image appears in the photo. Fitzroy and his childhood sweetheart, Cam, set out on a decade-long journey in search of this stranger's identity—and to reinstate his own—across seas and continents, into the far past and the evil and good that glint in the eyes of the elusive visitor. Seamlessly weaving together fact and fiction, Darwin's Ghosts holds up a different light to Conrad's "The horror! The horror!" and a different kind of answer to the urgent questions, Who are we? And what can we do about it?

Ariel Dorfman is considered to be one of “the greatest Latin American novelists” (Newsweek) and one of the United States’ most important cultural and political voices. A Chilean-American author born in Argentina, his numerous award-winning works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in more than fifty languages. His play Death and the Maiden, which has been performed in over one hundred countries, was made into a film by Roman Polanski. Among his works are the novels Widows, The Nanny and the Iceberg, Mascara, and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He recently published a collection of essays, Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages from the End of the World. He contributes to major papers worldwide, including frequent commentary in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, El País, the Guardian, Le Monde, and La Repubblica. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, Playboy, Index on Censorship, Guernica, and many other magazines and journals.  A prominent human rights activist, he lives with his wife, Angélica, in Chile and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Research Professor Emeritus of Literature at Duke University.