The book of chameleons

Typically for Agualusa this novel is beautifully written, rich in detail and imagination but always light and surprising.

A delight to read and reread...It is quite some pages into "The Man Who Sold Pasts" before you realise the narrator - rather charming, witty as he is - is a lizard.

A very articulate, and very friendly lizard, and - like all Agualusa's narrators - unusually perceptive.

But a lizard nonetheless. This narrator lives on Felix Ventura's living-room wall; Felix, the lizard's friend and hero of our story, is a man who sells pasts - if you don't like yours, he can come up with an entirely new one for you, a new past - full of better memories, with a complete lineage (as distinguished as you like), photos and all.

This is a book about the landscape of memory and its inconsistencies and randomness, about how we can remember things that never happened with extraordinary vividness, and forget things that did.