Remember Me Like This - Softcover

Johnston, Bret Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1444788078 ISBN 13: 9781444788075

Publisher: Two Roads, 2015

Synopsis

'I love this novel' John Irving
'Excellent' Sunday Times
'Enthralling' New York Times

By internationally bestselling author Bret Anthony Johnston, WINNER of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2017.

What happens to a family when a lost child returns?

In the four years since Justin's abduction his family has become a group of separate units, each nursing their pain and guilt.

Now, when they should be at their happiest, how can they forgive each other and become a family again?

A gripping literary novel with the pace of a thriller, Remember Me Like This introduces Bret Anthony Johnston as a gifted storyteller.

About this title

Review

I'm looking forward to a week in southern Spain in the company of Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston. It has a fascinating fictional premise: a missing child who comes back and a changed family who have to get used to the idea. I've dipped into it already and the writing is clear and beautiful. Besides, a novel that comes with effusive quotes from John Irving and Alice Sebold has to be pretty good. (Elizabeth Day Observer (Best Summer Reads 2014))

Johnston's excellent debut is primarily a literary novel, with old-fashioned virtues such as rich characterisation, strong structure and impeccable control of tone. Although it is reminiscent of John Updike, the mixture of summer heat and melancholy feels peculiarly Texan (The Sunday Times)

enthralling and skillful... the book's beauty is in its complexity, in its characters' endless search for the truth... uncomfortably revealing... What Johnston captures and examines so expertly isn't the kind of sadistic cruelty familiar to anyone with a television, but a subtler, more quietly menacing variety, the eggshell tiptoeing, the killing kindness we unknowingly inflict when acting out of love and fear... Remember Me Like This isn't a novel about kidnapping. It's not a psychological study of Stockholm syndrome or a victimology. It's not a thriller, and it's not even really a mystery, unless it's an unsolved one, the exquisitely moral mystery of how we struggle to accept and love the people we call family, even when we can't fully know them (New York Times)

Johnston has an ear for tidy phrases that pinpoint the elegiac in ho-hum domesticity, noting how blinds "ladder" light on to a bedspread or how, looking at Justin's sad father, an elderly widow would "like to sop him up with a biscuit". It's a suspenseful, uplifting portrait of a family in crisis. (Observer)

Remember Me Like This is certainly a page-turning read but more than that it's a subtle analysis of what the minutiae of ordinary life might be like when people find themselves in an extraordinary situation for which there's no rule book. (Daily Mail)

This stunning debut novel opens as 16-year-old Justin Campbell is reunited with his family four years after being abducted. Rather than signalling the end of their ordeal, it marks the start of a turbulent summer in the small town of Southport, Texas, as the Campbells fight to keep their family together. Anthony Johnston announces himself as a major new talent with a story that is beautifully written, in prose packed with imagery and emotion, which will keep readers thinking long after the final page. (Sunday Express)

Johnston, who directs the creative writing program at Harvard, isn't going to retell the story of a child's murder or a family's grief-fueled incineration. Instead, Remember Me Like This is the more emotionally subtle tale of a child's unexpected return and a family's complicated recovery... What happens after the cable news hysteria fades away, and the mayor issues a proclamation and the tearful grandparents fly back home? Are these rare families like lottery winners who celebrate in public and then, in the months that follow, squander their good fortune? This is the question Johnston explores with great tenderness in Remember Me Like This. Eric and Laura must relearn the motions of normal life, a life without psychics' tips, sponsored races and police updates. And normalcy proves much more difficult than anyone in this family anticipated. This portrayal of a family struggling through what should be its happiest moment is tremendously moving... there's real humanity in Johnston's writing, and it's heartening to spend time with these folks as they relearn how to be a family. Rendered in these compassionate, candid chapters, theirs is a struggle that speaks to those of us who have endured far less (Ron Charles Washington Post)

A powerful, complex and affecting debut. (Shortlist)

beautiful and engrossing book... a most moving novel and the least sensational take on a socially incendiary issue... What is so thrilling and moving about this novel is that the detail is so meticulous, the emotional lives are so brilliantly captured that every character stands out; there is heart and depth on every page... The physical detail, the narrative detail and the emotional detail are all one and the same in Johnston's fine writing... The emotional intelligence of the novel cuts deep, and reading it is a moving and ultimately uplifting experience. (Irish Examiner)

Superbly crafted... Told from a multiplicity of view points which quietly merge into a surprisingly gripping and suspenseful narrative... memorable.

(Sunday Business Post (Ireland))

Book Description

NYT NOTABLE BOOK - OBSERVER BEST HOLIDAY READS - BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME
A powerful and affecting novel of a family which has moved readers everywhere.

About this edition

• Publisher: Two Roads
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1444788078
• ISBN 13: 9781444788075
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384