Thursday, August 18, 2022

Top ten books about starting afresh

Born in Edinburgh and raised in the Scottish Borders, Ali Millar now lives in London.

She has an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from Edinburgh Napier University where she graduated with the class medal. As producer and broadcast journalist she has interviewed some of the world's leading authors, including Etgar Keret and Marina Warner.

The Last Days: a memoir of faith, desire and freedom is her first book.

At the Guardian Millar tagged ten books that "explore the possibilities and perils of remaking one’s life," including:
Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Our protagonist, his memory affected after an injury, sets out to recreate a room he thinks might have existed. Initially, he spots a crack in a wall reminding him of another crack, so he decides to hire someone to recreate the whole room. From there the entire building follows, then finally actors are called in to recreate specific moods and events that again may or may not have happened. Having lost his memory he should be free to begin again, but instead he is haunted by these fragments of the past. McCarthy creates a story about the impossibility of escaping memory as long as fragments of it remain.
Read about another entry on the list.

Remainder is among Emily Temple's fifty best novels about madness.

The Page 69 Test: Remainder.

--Marshal Zeringue