Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Memory and Straw - Angus Peter Campbell

Memory and Straw

By: Angus Peter Campbell

Hardcover | 30 January 2017

At a Glance

Hardcover


$34.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.69 with

 or 

Ships in 10 to 15 business days

A face is nothing without its history.

Gavin and Emma live in Manhattan. She's a musician. He works in Artificial Intelligence. He's good at his job. Scarily good. He's researching human features to make more realistic mask-bots - non-human 'carers' for elderly people. When his enquiry turns personal he's forced to ask whether his own life is an artificial mask.

Delving into family stories and his roots in the Highlands of Scotland, he embarks on a quest to discover his own true face, 'uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been'.

He returns to England to look after his Grampa. Travels. Reads old documents. Visits ruins. Borrows, plagiarises and invents.

But when Emma tells him his proper work is to make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw, which path will he choose? What's the best story he can give her?

A novel about the struggle for freedom and personal identity; what it means to be human. It fuses the glass and steel of our increasingly controlled algorithmic world with the memory and straw of our forebears' world controlled by traditions and taboos, the seasons and the elements.

Industry Reviews

This novel is about living, nothing less. A glorious adventure in voices, it sifts through memory and randomness, what we retain and do not, the vividness of the fragments that inexplicably linger in technicolour, and our own, never-outgrown, absurdity. It's about land and water and fairies; the marvellous and the unavoidable, and what we fi nally, with due modesty, grasp as essential. An irrepressible, quite remarkable, joy - JANICE GALLOWAY

You Can Find This Book In

More in Modern & Contemporary Fiction

Pilbara - Judy Nunn

Paperback

RRP $34.99

$26.99

23%
OFF
Half His Age - Jennette McCurdy

Paperback

RRP $32.99

$22.99

30%
OFF
The Director - Daniel Kehlmann

Paperback

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
Nesting - Roisin O'Donnell

Paperback

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
Escape! - Stephen Fishbach

Paperback

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
Antarctica : 'A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.' THE TIMES - Claire Keegan
So, I Met This Guy . . . - Alexandra Potter

RRP $34.99

$19.99

43%
OFF
Walk the Blue Fields : 'Pure magic.' Colm Toibin - Claire Keegan

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
In a Common Hour - Sita Walker

RRP $34.99

$22.99

34%
OFF
The Love Letter - Lucinda Riley

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
We Who Have No Gods : Acheron Order - Liza Anderson

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
Departure(s) - Julian Barnes

Hardcover

RRP $34.99

$26.99

23%
OFF
Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl : Academic Affairs - Julie Murphy
The Wrong Woman : A Vince Reid PI thriller - J.P. Pomare

RRP $22.99

$20.75

10%
OFF

This product is categorised by