The Wilderness
Samantha Harvey

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synopsis

It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now in his early sixties, he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.

As the disease takes hold, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by ‘poor Eleanor’, a childhood friend with whom, for some unfathomable reason, he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tried to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he’ll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?

Samantha Harvey

was born in England in 1975. She has lived in Ireland, New Zealand and Japan, writing, travelling and teaching and has co-founded an environmental charity. She completed the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course with distinction in 2005, where she was shortlisted for the PFD Prize. The Wilderness is her first novel.

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