Awake Awake
A Novel
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 4 ago 2026
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- USD 14.99
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- Pedido anticipado
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
Mary has started remembering things that she knows aren't real—but the events feel exactly like her actual memories. Who is she, if she can't be sure she knows her own past?
A writer in her 30s struggling to make rent, Mary has moved back to her childhood town to bartend and save money, when she starts remembering absurd events, clear and visceral as if they’d really happened to her. But she knows they’re too wild to be possible. Flashing back to her school years, she searches the past for what could have caused this split in her reality. The lives of their close group of school friends have since diverged, as life choices and politics, partners and children, have taken them to different places and placed them into other stories. But Mary must reconnect with them to find solid ground again.
Set against the disorienting and rapidly changing political backdrop of the 2000s and 2010s, Booker Prize finalist Mozley’s disarming coming-of-age tale is addictively readable, and poignantly captures the shakiness of identity – both personal and national – and the anchoring force of friendship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Struggling writer Mary Mooney comes to wonder if she's been fabricating "fabulous tales" of her childhood to her psychoanalyst in this quirky and intellectually complex novel from Mozley, author of the Booker-shortlisted Elmet. Among Mary's possible inventions are the disappearance of her troubled former schoolmate Billy Fletcher, her Christian minister father's heresy, and her Jewish grandfather's assassination of Hitler. Now a bartender in her hometown of York, Mary tries to reconcile her uncertainty about the past with the present, in which she keeps encountering figures from her fractured memory. These figures include her old friend Eric, now a popular podcaster, and her younger brother Jos, who's plagued by paranoid visions of Nazis following him. At the root of Mary's inquiry is the question of where she and her family fit into history, and if there's any logic to their story. Disagreeing with Eric, who believes a life "could be laid out in a neat line," she claims "History was chaos... and a human life was no different." Throughout this stimulating narrative, Mary looks to psychology, philosophy, and religion for the truth in what she remembers ("All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now"). It's an unforgettable inquiry into the nature of memory.
