Lost Memory of Skin - Softcover

Russell Banks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846685761 ISBN 13: 9781846685767

Publisher: The Clerkenwell Press, 2012

Synopsis

Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, a young man must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.

Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and reoffending sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership. But when the Professor's past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men's relationship shifts.

Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.

About this title

Review:

The uncompromising moral voice of our time (Michael Ondaatje)

If you've never read Russell Banks it's time you acquired the habit (Elmore Leonard)

Russell Banks tackles hard subjects with verve and courage, and Lost Memory of Skin takes us into the dark side of the dark side. Five stars. (Margaret Atwood, New York Times bestselling author)

Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks. (Jonathan Franzen)

We live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain (Janet Maslin New York Times 2011-09-25)

Banks is one of those precious writers like Twain or Salinger who creates a voice so wonderfully real that the experience of reading them is like a conversation with an old friend (Sunday Times)

Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country (Cornel West)

I trust his portrait of America more than any other-the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it. (Michael Ondaatje)

Russell Banks's new novel is as haunting as its title. Lost Memory of Skin plumbs the shadowy sub-basement of American society, circa right now. This is Banks with all his stars out: the spring-loaded sentence, the searing moral clarity, the knowing heart. Lost Memory of Skin shows a living master at the height of his powers. It is a gripping and important book. (Jennifer Haigh, author of 2004 PEN/Hemingway Award winner Mrs. Kimble and New York Times bestseller and 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award winner Baker Towers)

Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power. (Boston Globe)

Book Description:

A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from a great American writer

About this edition

• Publisher: The Clerkenwell Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1846685761
• ISBN 13: 9781846685767
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432