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In Stefan Merrill Block?s extraordinary debut, three narratives intertwine to create a story that is by turns funny, smart, introspective, and revelatory.
Random House
April 2008
On Sale: April 3, 2008
320 pages
ISBN: 1400066794
EAN: 9781400066797
Hardcover
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Fiction
Abel Haggard is an elderly hunchback who haunts the remnants
of his family’s farm in the encroaching shadow of the Dallas
suburbs, adrift in recollections of those he loved and lost
long ago. As a young man, he believed himself to be “the one
person too many”; now he is all that remains. Hundreds of
miles to the south, in Austin, Seth Waller is a teenage
“Master of Nothingness”–a prime specimen of that gangly,
pimple-rashed, too-smart breed of adolescent that vanishes
in a puff of sarcasm at the slightest threat of human
contact. When his mother is diagnosed with a rare form of
early-onset Alzheimer’s, Seth sets out on a quest to find
her lost relatives and to conduct an “empirical
investigation” that will uncover the truth of her genetic
history. Though neither knows of the other’s existence, Abel
and Seth are linked by a dual legacy: the disease that
destroys the memories of those they love, and the story of
Isidora–an edenic fantasy world free from the sorrows of
remembrance, a land without memory where nothing is ever
possessed, so nothing can be lost. Through the fusion of myth, science, and storytelling, this
novel offers a dazzling illumination of the hard-learned
truth that only through the loss of what we consider
precious can we understand the value of what remains.
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