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  • *** This comment contains spoilers! ***

  • I figured out the plot relatively early in the story, and had it confirmed by my friend who lent it to me: the main character gets complete and unrelenting amnesia, and eventually has a memory transplant, which gives him back a life. A life, not his life. Interesting enough. Sounds more sci-fi than ... Continue

    I figured out the plot relatively early in the story, and had it confirmed by my friend who lent it to me: the main character gets complete and unrelenting amnesia, and eventually has a memory transplant, which gives him back a life. A life, not his life. Interesting enough. Sounds more sci-fi than anything else, but this is serious fiction, and serious fiction suffers when the story gets lost in the prose. And that's exactly what happened here.

    

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• ― Coilette said on Mar 11, 2008 | Add your feedback

A luminous and unforgettable first novel by an astonishing new voice in fiction, hailed by Esquire magazine as “one of America’s best young writers.”

Samson Greene, a young and popular professor at Columbia, is found wandering in the Nevada desert. When his wife, Anna, comes to bring him home, she finds a man who remembers nothing, not even his own name. The removal of a small brain tumor saves his life, but his memories beyond the age of twelve are permanently lost.

Here is the story of a keenly intelligent, sensitive man returned to a life in which everything is strange and new. An emigrant from his own life, set free from all that once defined him, Samson Greene believes he has nothing left to lose. So, when a charismatic scientist asks him to participate in a bold experiment, he agrees. Launched into a turbulent journey that takes him to the furthest extremes of solitude and intimacy, what he gains is nothing short of the revelation of what it means to be human.