What determines your identity? Is it the clothes you wear?
The way other people treat you? The stories, anecdotes and experiences you
have stored in your memory? When Nick Petrov wakes up in a hospital room,
his clothes are two sizes too big. Everyone treats him like a victim. And he
can't remember how he got there in the first place.
Nick Petrov is a
brilliant private investigator with a reputation for bringing missing
children safely home. Launched to tabloid stardom when he apprehended a
brutal serial killer named Gerald Reasoner, Petrov has become something of a
celebrity. When a woman approaches him, begging him to use his unique gifts
to find her missing daughter, Petrov's instincts sound an alarm. He senses
that she's concealing something. But is she lying to get Petrov's help or to
set him up? Three days later, just as he has amassed all the answers he
needs to close the case, they are swept away into oblivion.
Petrov awakes in a hospital bed, his memory of the past two weeks a
complete blank, his personality altered. He is tempted to just put the
trauma behind him and move on with his life, but there are too many things
holding him back. When he returns home, he discovers a photograph full of
strangers. In his office is a greeting card with a cryptic message inside,
both the receiver and the sender completely unknown. His bank account has
been augmented by a $450 check from a woman he can't remember. All of it
points to a case he cannot recall.
Digging for answers when he doesn't even know the questions, Petrov
begins to fear he is searching for the most elusive quarry he has ever
hunted: himself. Uncomfortable truths about his past rise up from this
haunting investigation, truths that force him to reinterpret the events of
the notorious Reasoner case from years before. But the closer Petrov comes
to solving the mystery, the more likely it seems that the monster he's
looking for is staring back at him in the mirror.
BOOK REVIEWS
BookBrowse
As Joyce Carol Oates so eloquently puts it, "Oblivion immerses us in Petrov's assailed consciousness as he navigates his way through a Dali landscape of baffling clues, memory lapses, and visual hallucinations.." Full Review (302 words).
Media Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Abrahams creates palpable empathy for the bruised Nick and his pitch-perfect prose is a joy.
The New York Times Oblivion is so circuitously plotted that the reader's memory gets as much of a workout as Nick's does.
The New Yorker
Unforgetable...Oblivion is composed in spare yet often poetic prose...a new thriller from an unheralded master of suspense.
The Chicago Tribune - Dick Adler
...Could it be because Abrahams makes it seem so natural and easy that not enough people recognize the effort and the talent at work in his books? His 14th novel, the stunning thriller Oblivion, should--in a perfect world--put an end to that.
Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese
Fantastic Grade A Review! - You know you're holding a first-rate thriller when you take it with you in the car to read at stoplights. Peter Abrahams' marvelous Oblivion tweaks the conventions of the Michael Connelly-style whodunit to create a novel that is at once classically suspenseful and completely fresh.
Joyce Carol Oates
Neurological impairment is something we're all too likely to know firsthand, and Peter Abrahams's suspense novel Oblivion makes of this condition something rich and strange: an investigation into "lost time, like some dark forest in a fairy tale."
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by gofish not very good I just finished this as an audio book which is probably the only way I was able to get through it. I agree with another reviewer in so far as I also had trouble keeping up with clues and characters including the new, the lost and the found again. A... Read More
Rated of 5
by Philadelphia reader Hackneyed writing I expected to enjoy this book, based on the many positive reviews, but it was a huge disappointment. The characters were one-dimensional and trite and the writing was unimaginative. I didn't finish it, despite a noble try.
War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that AS Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark.
A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, exploring how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths.
Brilliantly evoking the long-vanished world of masters and servants, Margaret Powell's classic memoir of her time in service is the remarkable true story of an indomitable woman who, though she served in the great houses of England, never stopped aiming high.
Vivid, daring, and unforgettable, The Printmaker's Daughter shines fresh light on art, loyalty, and the tender and indelible bond between a father and daughter.
I read The Healing in two sittings it is a fascinating story of plantation life at the beginning of the Civil War. Granada, a slave newborn child...
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The Uncommon Reader is a novella by novelist and playwright, Alan Bennett. The story starts with the Queen coming across the mobile library van...
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Arizona bills Amazon for $53 million in uncollected sales tax(Feb 06 2012) The ongoing sales tax battle between many US states and large online retailers, most notably Amazon, continues with a thrust from Arizona which, last week,...
Full Story
Amazon rumored to be opening bricks and mortar stores(Feb 03 2012) There are mumblings in the blogosphere that Amazon is to open bricks and mortar stores. Launch.it offers four possible scenarios:
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Kirkus Reviews
The New York Times
Joyce Carol Oates
of 5
by gofish
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