The Amnesiac
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A gripping literary thriller from an exciting new voice in fiction
Hailed as 'one to watch' by the UK's Telegraph, Sam Taylor is one of the most imaginative and innovative young writers at work today. With The Amnesiac, his United States debut, he incorporates a murder mystery and a forgotten manuscript into an exhilarating and intelligent novel. When twenty-nine-year-old James Purdew returns to England from his home in Amsterdam, it is to discover what happened during three earlier years of his life that he cannot recall. What he finds, in an old house with a tragic history, is a nineteenth-century manuscript that begins to seem less and less like a work of fiction-and more like the key to his own lost past. Memory and amnesia, fiction and reality, destiny and randomness, heaven and hell-all converge to form an engrossing gothic story that is sure to appeal to fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Taylor (The Republic of Trees) makes his U.S. debut with a complex work of metafiction that will resonate with Jorge Luis Borges fans. James Purdew, a 30-year-old unemployed Englishman living in Amsterdam, suffers an identity crisis after tripping on the stairs to the apartment he shares with his Dutch girlfriend, Ingrid, and breaking his ankle. After Ingrid leaves him, Purdew rereads his journals and decides to write his life story backwards, beginning with Ingrid. He believes the project, titled Memoirs of an Amnesiac, will help him find his "way out of the labyrinth." To complicate matters, after returning to the U.K. and finding work in construction, Purdew discovers a 19th-century manuscript titled Confessions of a Killer hidden in a wall of a flat he's renovating. A fine stylist, Taylor keeps a lot of balls in the air, but all the philosophizing tends to slow a narrative that offers plenty of mystery but not enough resolution.
