Twenty-eight storytellers--one for each letter in the Arabic alphabet--meet in a garden to tell the story of a poet, Eusebio, arrested in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Eusebio, a friend of García Lorca and his Circle, had escaped assassination and fled to North Africa.

Some tales embroider his shadowly life with stories that feature the pasha's cook, the slave-market, Aysha and the stork... Others want to know if Eusebio betrayed his fascist friends by confessing in a show-trial or played the shadowy role of double-agent. Is he Eugenio the World War Two black marketeer from Tangiers or Alphonse van Worden, supposed descendent of Count Potocki, doyen of Marrakesh queens with his Rolls, Philippines' chauffeur and home showings of Mary Pickford movies?

With answers that are violent, parodic and erotic, Goytisolo's storytellers question the nature of memory, history and myth. Tristram Shandy and A Thousand and One Nights are enlisted to show the chameleon nature of truth. In The Garden of Secrets, Juan Goytisolo reminds us that ultimately it is fiction that is the arbiter of what really happened.