The Strange Case of Jane O.
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
In this spellbinding and provocative novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles, a young mother is struck by sudden and puzzling psychological symptoms that illuminate the mysterious dimensions of the human mind—and of love.
A Belletrist Book Club Pick
A year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. Three days after her first visit to a psychiatrist, Jane suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.
Are Jane’s strange experiences the result of being overwhelmed by motherhood, or are they manifestations of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago and who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever deeper into the farthest reaches of her mind and cause him to question everything he thinks he knows about so-called reality—including events in his own life.
Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is both a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate and a mesmerizing literary puzzle about the bonds of love—between mother and child, between a man and a woman, and among those we’ve lost but who may still be among us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The mesmerizing latest from Walker (The Age of Miracles) is a fantastical tale of a mother's mysterious visions and memory lapses. Psychiatrist Henry Byrd is called to a Brooklyn emergency room after Jane O.—a single mother who was found unconscious in Prospect Park, with no memory of what happened during the previous 25 hours—requests him by name. As Jane was Byrd's patient for just one session, he's surprised to be summoned. But when she tells him about a vivid hallucination of a middle-aged man who she knew as a teen before he died decades earlier, and who gives her an elliptical warning to "get out of the city," the details capture Byrd's attention ("A hallucination of extended duration, not just a brief flash of something unreal, is more alarming in terms of prognosis," Walker writes). Jane is also troubled by her amnesia—she ordinarily has perfect autobiographical memory, or the ability to remember every incident of her life to the smallest detail. Byrd grows increasingly fascinated by Jane, and when she disappears for days after another apparent fugue state, he throws himself into investigating a diagnosis more mystical than anything found in the DSM-5. Jane's story unfolds in sections structured alternately as Byrd's clinical notes and her own journal, which takes the form of letters to her infant son. As Byrd's tone becomes more confessional, the narrative opens up an alluring vision of how personal history and memory intertwine. This one is tough to shake.
