A first novel of considerable maturity powerful, original, cunningly constructed, and timely. --Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of an EndingAfter years alone in a cell, an aging prisoner is released without explanation, expelled into a great city now utterly unfamiliar to him. Broken by years of brutality at the hands of the prison guards, he scrounges for scraps, sleeping wild, until a museum curator rescues him from an assault. The museum has just opened its most controversial exhibit a perfect replica of the marshes, an expansive wilderness still wracked by conflict. There the man had spent years as a doctor among the hated and feared marshmen, who have been colonized but never conquered. Then Marshlands reveals one of its many surprises it is written in reverse.
