The Amnesia Clinic
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This debut, set in Ecuador, mines the rich territory of the secret lives of teenage boys. Anti, an English expatriate, is a student at the Quito International School, where he meets Fabi n, a talented and attractive classmate. Fabi n takes a surprise liking to Anti, and the two soon develop a language and world of their own, in which the lines between reality and fiction blur. In the compelling stories within this story, Fabi n returns time and again to his parents' deaths, convinced his mother escaped the fiery car crash that also killed his father. Anti, seeking to calm his friend's increasingly wild speculations, produces a fake newspaper clipping about an amnesia clinic where victims of memory loss are cared for. The two go in search of the clinic, where they imagine, or pretend, they might find Fabi n's mother. Their trip, which begins as a promising and fun escape, eventually goes awry, leaving Anti to patch together a suitable story from the wreckage. Scudamore admirably portrays the braggadocio, sexual fantasies and obsessions of 15-year-old boys. Like his characters, he is a fast, funny, efficient storyteller; he appears more comfortable in the book's lighter first half than in its darker conclusion. Nonetheless, this story is tough to forget.
