The Wilderness

The “stunning” (The Guardian) debut novel from the Booker Prize–winning author of Orbital, about a man who is losing his past to Alzheimer’s—also a Booker Prize nominee and an Orange Prize finalist

“Closer to Virginia Woolf’s meditative novels than anything else I can think of. . . . This is . . . Mrs. Dalloway prose.”—The Washington Post Book World

Jake is in the tailspin of old age. His wife has passed away, his son is in prison, and, as Alzheimer’s takes hold of him, his memories have become increasingly unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? Why is his son imprisoned? And why can’t he shake the memory of a yellow dress and one lonely, echoing gunshot?
 
The Wilderness holds us in its grip from the first sentence to the last with the sheer beauty of its language and its ruminations on love and loss.