The Wilderness

A gripping novel about a man who is losing his past to Alzheimer's. Like Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, The Wilderness holds us in its grip from the first sentence to the last with the sheer beauty of its language and its ruminations on love and loss.

"Closer to Virginia Woolf's meditative novels than anything else I can think of.... This is...Mrs. Dalloway prose." --The Washington Post Book World

Jake is in the tailspin of old age. His wife has passed away, his son is in prison, and now Alzheimer's is taking hold of him. Jake's memories become increasingly unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? Why is his son imprisoned? And why can't he shake the memory of a yellow dress and one lonely, echoing gunshot?

"[A] brave imagining of [Alzheimer's].... There are moments of clarity; there is the persistence of desire; there are enduring long-term memories that remain after there is no capacity to recall what was for breakfast or if there was breakfast or what the thing called breakfast is." --The New York Times


About the Author
SAMANTHA HARVEY was born in Kent, England, in 1975. She has an M.A. in philosophy and an M.A., with distinction, from the Bath Spa Creative Writing course in 2005. In addition to writing, she has traveled extensively and taught in Japan and lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently cofounded an environmental charity. She lives in Bath, England.