Brad Thor's Summer 2018 Fiction Pick for THE TODAY SHOW!
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Elle &; Refinery29 &; PopSugar &; Verge
"Eerie, dark, and compelling, [The Book of M] will not disappoint lovers of The Passage and Station Eleven." --Booklist
WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER?
Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man&;s shadow disappears&;an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max&;s shadow disappears too.
Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.
Industry Reviews
"Sheperd's debut is graceful and riveting, slowly peeling back layers of an intricately constructed and unsettling alternate future."--Publishers Weekly "Fans of Station Eleven, listen up!...This one is g-r-e-a-t."--Book Riot "First-time novelist Shepherd has crafted an engaging and twisty tale about memory's impact on who or what we become. For aficionados of literary dystopian fiction such as Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven or those who enjoy stories of cross-country travel."--Library Journal "Prepare to fall in love with your own shadow. And to lose sleep. Shepherd is urgently good, and has written one of those books that makes you look up at two in the morning, to a world that's new, newly scary, and freshly appreciated: what all the great stories do."--David Lipsky, New York Times bestselling author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself and Absolutely American "The Book of M is exciting, imaginative, unique, and beautiful. Shepherd proves herself not just a writer to watch, but a writer to treasure."--Darin Strauss, bestselling author of Half a Life "I was both disturbed and inspired by Max's and Ory's journey through apocalypses large and small. Peng Shepherd has written a prescient, dark fable for the now and for the soon-to-be. The Book of M is our beautiful nightmare shadow."--Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
