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A Novel
by Fiona Mozley
Mary has started remembering things that she knows aren't real—but the events feel exactly like her actual memories. Who is she, if she can't be sure she knows her own past?
A writer in her 30s struggling to make rent, Mary has moved back to her childhood town to bartend and save money, when she starts remembering absurd events, clear and visceral as if they'd really happened to her. But she knows they're too wild to be possible. Flashing back to her school years, she searches the past for what could have caused this split in her reality. The lives of their close group of school friends have since diverged, as life choices and politics, partners and children, have taken them to different places and placed them into other stories. But Mary must reconnect with them to find solid ground again.
Set against the disorienting and rapidly changing political backdrop of the 2000s and 2010s, Booker Prize finalist Mozley's disarming coming-of-age tale is addictively readable, and poignantly captures the shakiness of identity – both personal and national – and the anchoring force of friendship.
"[Q]uirky...[A]n unforgettable inquiry into the nature of memory." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Sharp characters and introspection characterize an engrossing tale that dodges between the fragile and the crisply real." —Kirkus Reviews
"A warm, kindly and beautifully written novel about growing up in a family and in history, about inconvenient memory and haunted repression." ―Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall
"An incredible achievement—a story of friendship, memory, loss, and moral duty unlike any I've read before. It's beautifully written, elegantly structured, and so tight with tension that I paced my office as I read the last fifty pages. It's a masterfully crafted love story and adventure story and family mythology all rolled into one, and chock full of well-earned surprises; every character and storyline could be its own novel, and yet they come together so thunderously and convincingly that I believed even the hallucinations. It blew me away! You'll read it in two sittings." ―Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee
This information about Awake Awake was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fiona Mozley was born in East London and raised in York, in the North of England. She studied history at Cambridge and then lived in Buenos Aires and London, working at a literary agency and at a travel center. Her first novel, Elmet, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. She lives in Edinburgh with her partner and their dog. Mozley's second novel, Hot Stew, is available now.
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