[Dark Back of Time] shows sensitivity in exploring an entire shadowland of human experience just beyond the reach of words, and could be said to represent a culminating point in its author's long career
Times Literary Supplement

It is a rare gift, to be offered a writer who lives in our own time but speaks with the intensity of the past, who comes with the extra richness lent by foreign history and nonetheless knows our own culture inside out
New York Times

Witty, readable, moving and insistently thought-provoking-in the manner of Sebald
Irish Independent

Dark Back of Time brings us a writer who is prepared to set up his apparatus and conduct the narrative experiment in broad daylight, without the benefit of smoke and mirrors
Scotland on Sunday

He uses language like an anatomist uses the scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh in order to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being
W. G. Sebald