Awake Awake
the new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of Elmet
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
'An incredible achievement, a story of friendship, memory, loss, and moral duty unlike any I've read before' Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee
Mary is struggling with her memory. She does not have too few recollections but too many, including some that are downright absurd. She has many memories of her childhood: going to parties and on school trips, walks with her father and family dinners. She remembers world events too: the falling of the Twin Towers and the Iraq War. But the most concerning memories she has are about her Jewish grandfather and his role in the death of Adolf Hitler. She feels sure - almost completely sure - that what she has been told can't be true, that she must have imagined the whole thing. But there is a doubt.
To decipher fact from fiction, Mary goes back over her life, sorting through her childhood and adolescence with her three friends in York, through an adulthood accustomed to tragedy. Guided by her family and friends, Mary attempts to figure out what is real, both in history and her own life, all the while wondering if her mind has conjured everything.
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.
