The Wilderness: A Novel (Hardcover)

Winner of the 2009 Betty Trask Prize
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009
Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award
Longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize

“A haunting, intelligent novel, crowded with powerful characters, told in a language that is never ordinary, but always clear and elegant.”
—Tessa Hadley, author of The Master Bedroom and Sunstroke and Other Stories

“It used to be thought that Alzheimer's unspooled the brain in the precise order in which it had grown, a decline that matched, plot point for plot point, childhood development-a kind of neural Curious Case of Benjamin Button. As the English novelist Samantha Harvey suggests in The Wilderness, her brave imagining of the disease, it's less linear and more complicated. There are moments of clarity; there is the persistence of desire; there are enduing long-term memories that remain after there is no capacity to recall what was for breakfast or if there was breakfast or what the thing called breakfast is… While most books about Alzheimer's are written from the outside looking in, this one stays within the ever-narrowing parameters of Jacob's mind.., Earlier in her life, Samantha Harvey studied philosophy, and that training is felt here, where the nature of truth is as much the protagonist as Jacob Jameson himself, and Alzheimer's disease is equally villain and muse. Every life is a mystery, Harvey seems to be saying, even to the one whose life it is.”
—New York Times Book Review

“In the glut of novels being published at the moment a really exciting debut is as rare as it ever was. Samantha Harvey's first novel is an extraordinary dramatization of a mind in the process of disintegration. [The Wilderness is] brilliant— read it now, before it scoops up all the prizes.”
—The Times (UK)

“Moving through a rich, protean mental landscape, Jake recalls and reinvents his life's themes and passions… Using recurrent, simple images—the flash of a yellow dress, freckled eyelids—Harvey beautifully, patiently ushers Jake forward to the last flicker of recognition; the whole a stunning composition of human fragility and intensity.
—The Guardian (UK)

"The Wilderness is Samantha Harvey's first novel, but it feels like a mature work, as well crafted and as cryptic—'familiar and strange in one breath'—as an ancient boat found preserved in the peat of the northern-England moors where the book is mostly set.”
—Bookforum

“Harvey infuses the text with compassion. [The Wilderness] conveys the importance of dignity and respect for those we love, no matter what their affliction.”
—Las Vegas Review-Journal

"A treat for literature lovers who appreciate complexity in their novels and aren't afraid to deal with tough topics."
—Library Journal

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 he is in his mid-sixties, and 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 of him, 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 fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries 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?

From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.