September 1, 2024
The latest from bestselling Walker, author of the multi-best-booked The Age of Miracles and The Dreamers, draws inspiration from the case notes of psychiatrist Oliver Sacks. After her child is born, Jane experiences strange episodes, including amnesia, premonitions, and hallucinations. As her psychiatrist delves further into her mysterious condition, it brings into question his own ideas of reality. Prepub Alert.
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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from November 1, 2024
New York City psychiatrist Henry Byrd is confused when a new patient, Jane O., arrives in his office. She is reserved and cryptic, saying only that something strange happened to her. Byrd is shaken but doesn't expect to see her again--until Jane disappears overnight and wakes in Prospect Park with no memory. Jane names Byrd as her doctor, and they begin a tenuous psychiatric relationship. He learns that Jane can name exactly what happened on every day of her life, including every detail of the places she has visited. Jane's fugues seem impossible, and Byrd is determined to understand them. Meanwhile, Jane writes letters to her baby son, hoping he will read them in the future. Jane's accounts match up to what she's told Byrd, but soon discrepancies come to light. In the acknowledgments, Thompson Walker (The Dreamers, 2019) writes that she spent years researching this book, and that research is evident in Byrd. He draws on his vast knowledge of the brain and how memories are formed even as he questions both Jane's mind and his own. What is real and what is created only in our minds? Thompson Walker's masterful prose propels the reader through this haunting and sublime story. Highly recommended.
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Starred review from November 15, 2024
A New York City psychiatrist treats a patient with troubling blackouts and hallucinations, raising a host of tantalizing questions about the nature of psychology, memory, and linear time. As the title implies, the book is presented largely as a case study, with Dr. Henry Byrd writing about his patient Jane O., a 38-year-old single mother, with measured detachment. Days after their abbreviated first session in the spring of 2018--Jane walked out after only 14 minutes, saying "I think this was a mistake"--she turns up in an emergency room with no memory of the previous 25 hours; she names Dr. Byrd as her doctor. While the hospital soon releases Jane, Dr. Byrd becomes increasingly fascinated by her unusual case. Jane has hyperthymesia--an excessive, accurate memory for dates, places, and events--but has also recently experienced a frightening hallucination: She saw and even talked with a man she knows died when they were both teenagers. As her therapy with Dr. Byrd progresses, she suffers increasingly worrisome blackouts and hallucinations. While the police suspect she's a fake, Dr. Byrd's attempts at diagnosis lead him to fascinating, bizarre-sounding theories. Meanwhile, at Dr. Byrd's urging, Jane begins writing a journal in the form of letters to her son that she hopes will explain her situation to him in the future. Revealing details she has yet to share with Dr. Byrd, the letters show that she's a caring mother and a self-aware, if lonely, person--not unlike Dr. Byrd, an equally caring single father facing personal and professional difficulties that medical ethics prevent him from discussing with Jane. The relationships among scientific fact, emotion, and psychology are tangled here. No viewpoint is reliable, but no one is wrong. Just when the truth seems sad but clear, Walker throws in a twist (or two) to turn the narrative on its head in satisfyingly disturbing ways, especially given that Walker's last novel, The Dreamers (2019)--about an imaginary epidemic--seemed like pure fiction when it was published in pre-Covid times. A novel that begins quietly becomes an exhilarating and riveting must-read and then read-again.
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Starred review from October 7, 2024
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.
December 13, 2024
Walker (The Dreamers) often juxtaposes the past and what might be the future, to create stories that feel both visceral and luminous. In Walker's new novel, Jane experiences amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations and more during the first year of her single motherhood. Jane goes to see a psychiatrist, who tries to determine why she's having these experiences, but the mystery eventually makes him question reality too. They tell their separate yet increasingly--and somewhat pathologically--linked stories, which touch on how what is missing multiplies, proliferating in memory. Walker examines mental health through multiple lenses, and she deftly layers the brighter moments with the ones that are decidedly the opposite. At once quiet and intense, the novel takes an unexpected turn during its final chapters that begs its audience to reread in search of clues. VERDICT Perfect for readers who like their literary fiction with an edge of psychological mystery. This further solidifies Walker's reputation for writing realistic character-driven fiction that just so happens to take place in fragmented, fractured worlds verging on the fantastical and fatalistic. Give to readers who enjoyed Jennifer Cody Epstein's The Madwomen of Paris and to fans of Emily St. John Mandel.--Emily Bowles
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