Samantha Harvey
The Wilderness: A Novel
Hardcover $180
ISBN: 9780385527637 Published February 2009

英國Orange Prize 入圍作品，崑南介紹：「The Wilderness 寫老年痴呆病患者從破碎記憶中重拾自己的身份…是筆者的一杯茶。」本書描繪一位年屆60 的老人如何以僅餘的記憶及生活的線索拼凑他過去的一生。

A haunting, intelligent novel, crowded with powerful characters, told in a language that is never orginary, but always clear and elegant.
— Tessa Hadley, author of The Master Bedroom and Sunstroke and Other Stories

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 mid-sixties, 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.

As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he’ll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?

From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

Born in Kent, England in 1975, Samantha Harvey has completed postgraduate courses in philosophy and in Creative Writing. In addition to writing, she has traveled extensively and taught in Japan and has lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently co-founded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.