Memory Wall

(Paperback)

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From the author of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, a collection of stories about memory: the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others.
In the luminous title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old womans secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In The River Nemunas, a teenaged orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. And in Afterworld, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.

The stories in Memory Wall show us how we figure the world, and show Anthony Doerr to be a master of the form.

Reviews

It's fair to say that Anthony Doerr is doing things with the short story that have rarely been attempted and seldom achieved. The stories in Memory Wall have such scope and depth that they hit as hard as novels three times their length. Doerr has set a new standard, I think, for what a story can do. Dave Eggers

Ambitiously wide-ranging and inventive, Doerrs six stories movingly investigate the ways in which we are nothing without memory. Sunday Times

Doerr is a lusciously good stylist. Guardian

If this book's wisdom can be summed up in a single line it is this one, from Afterworld: Within the wet enclosure of a single mind a person can fly from one decade to the next, one country to another, past to present, memory to imagination. That thought informs Memory Wall many times. Janet Maslin, Scotsman

Author Bio

Anthony Doerr is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, currently in development as a Netflix limited series. He is also the author of two short story collections, Memory Wall and The Shell Collector; the novel About Grace; and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, all published by 4th Estate. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.