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HarperCollins
October 2011
On Sale: September 27, 2011
Featuring: Kid
432 pages
ISBN: 0061857637
EAN: 9780061857638
Kindle: B005FFW2C4
Paperback / e-Book
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Fiction
The acclaimed author of The Sweet Hereafter and
Rule of the Bone returns with a provocative new novel
that illuminates the shadowed edges of contemporary American
culture with startling and unforgettable results
Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo,
the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s
uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a
life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his
new identity only as the Kid, and on probation after doing
time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to
a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500
feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to
go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida
causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex
offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid,
despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by
impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to
comprehend. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own
life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of
enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect
subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism
among convicted sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative
partnership, the Kid remaining wary of the Professor’s
motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial
assistance of the older man. When the camp beneath
the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a
hurricane all but destroys the settlement, the Professor
tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to
teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and
understanding, what he has done. But when the Professor’s
past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully
constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship
shifts. Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything
he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to
take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.
Long one of our most acute and insightful novelists,
Russell Banks often examines the indistinct boundaries
between our intentions and actions. A mature and masterful
work of contemporary fiction from one of our most
accomplished storytellers, Lost Memory of Skin
unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical,
show-casing Banks at his most compelling, his reckless sense
of humor and intense empathy at full bore. The
perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of
Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where
zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and
compassion—a society where isolating the offender has
perhaps created a new kind of victim.
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