The Amnesia Clinic
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409079699
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

The Amnesia Clinic

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EBook
1 Sep 2010
Paperback
1 Jun 2007
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Rich in South American colour, this cleverly crafted novel deals with storytelling itself - the motivations for spinning a yarn and the consequences of taking a tale too far.

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.

Anti, a quiet English boy living in Quito, Ecuador, strikes up a friendship with flamboyant classmate Fabián, who is everything Anti isn't: handsome, athletic and popular. What's more, he lives with his rakish Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents.

Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales, and before long their relationship becomes one conducted entirely through the telling of tales. One subject, however, is taboo: Fabián's parents. But when details surrounding their disappearance begin to emerge, Anti decides to console his friend with a story suggesting that Fabián's mother may be living at a bizarre hospital on the coast for patients with memory loss. With confused emotions and reality losing its tenuous grip, the boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an 'Amnesia Clinic' that may, or may not exist.

The Amnesia Clinic won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409079699
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
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About the author

James Scudamore

James Scudamore is the author of the novels Wreaking, Heliopolis, and The Amnesia Clinic. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and been nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Man Booker Prize.

www.jamesscudamore.com

portrait photo of James Scudamore

Also by James Scudamore

English Monsters
Wreaking
Heliopolis
See all

Praise for The Amnesia Clinic

A compulsively readable novel about the seductiveness of storytelling... Both his characters and the electrifying manner in which Scudamore writes about Ecuador demonstrate the appeal as well as the danger of any fabulist's capacity for wonder

Literary Review

A nostalgic, compelling adventure laced with black humour

Time Out

A polished debut... Turns the tables on both characters and readers as imagination segues into dangerous reality

Guardian

A wonderful debut - witty, polished, fluent and effortlessly entertaining

Hilary Mantel

An inventive debut

Herald

Bewitching...Highly recommended. Scudamore has talent to burn

Matt Thorne, Sunday Telegraph

Scudamore has fun blurring the edges of truth and fiction, creating fantastic and colourful stories within stories

Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday

Scudamore has produced a clever, witty and believable debut. A fantastic read

Caroline Gibb, Scotsman