From one of Spain's most celebrated writers, an extraordinary, inspired book-at once fiction, history, and memoir-that draws on the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges to tell a twentieth-century story. Shifting seamlessly from the past to the present and following the routes of escape across countries and continents, Muñoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive pattern-from Eugenia Ginsburg...

De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Walter Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman...each a walker and city-dweller, each a collagist and chronicler, picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new, shocking, and beautiful. In To Walk Alone in the Crowd, Antonio Muñoz Molina emulates these classical inspirations, following their peregrinations as well as telling their stories, in a book that is part memoir,...