Samantha Harvey asks a question. What will Jake be able salvage from the wreckage of his mind: beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?

It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early 60s, and he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.

Longlisted
The Man Booker Prize 2009
Published by
Jonathan Cape
Publication date
Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey

About the Author

An inspiration for Samantha Harvey’s novel about an architect afflicted with Alzheimer’s was John Bayley’s account of Booker Prize-winner Iris Murdoch’s struggles with the disease.
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