这是一部催人入眠的小说，它将作者的过去与 James Earl Ray在射杀马丁路德金后逃跑的尝试缠绕在一起。

时间是1968年，James Earl Ray枪杀了马丁路德金。在两个月的时间里，他躲过了政府,驱车前往加拿大，弄到了一本假护照，然后飞到伦敦。与此同时，他憧憬着媒体对他所在的位置迷惑不解，他在FBI头号通辑犯名单上的形象。最后，他在里斯本的葡萄牙酒店下榻，在这里他着急地等待着去安哥拉的签证。但签证没有出现，在他最后的10个自由日中，Ray游览了整个里斯本，花钱找乐子，排练着他的假身份。

通过最近才消密的FBI档案，Antonio Muñoz Molina重组了Ray穿过葡萄牙首都的最后几步，将我们带入了他十分活跃的大脑、不幸的过去和那起臭名昭著的犯罪。但里斯本这座城市也激发了Muñoz Molina的**部小说《里斯本的一位作家》。如今他回归了，30年之后，它成了三个交错故事的舞台和见证者：1968年成为国际通缉犯的Ray；1987年30岁的Muñoz Molina努力寻找着自己的文学声音；然后就是现在的作者，思考着自己的人生和小说形式——作为通过另外一个人的眼睛想象这个世界的工具。

《就像一个褪色的阴影》既是一部虚构的历史，也是一部虚构的自传，它探讨了在身份的建构中，想象的、报道的和经历的过去之间的界限。

Shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018

On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered by a man named James Earl Ray. Before Ray's capture and sentencing to 99 years' imprisonment, he evaded the FBI for two months as he crossed the globe under various aliases. At the heart of his story is Lisbon, where he spent ten days attempting to acquire an Angolan visa.

Like a Fading Shadow traces three journeys to the city: Ray's desperate attempt to evade justice in 1968; a research trip undertaken by the young Muñoz Molina for his breakthrough novel Winter in Lisbon in 1987; and the return journey taken by the novelist as he attempts to reconstruct these twin stories from the instability of the past, and interrogates his own obsession with one of the twentieth century's most notorious figures.

Aided by the recent declassification of James Earl Ray's FBI case file, Like a Fading Shadow boldly weaves a taut retelling of Ray's assassination of King, his time on the run and his eventual capture together with a highly original, fearlessly honest examination of the novelist's own past.