Remember Me Like This

I'm looking forward to a week in southern Spain in the company of Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston. It has a fascinating fictional premise: a missing child who comes back and a changed family who have to get used to the idea. I've dipped into it already and the writing is clear and beautiful. Besides, a novel that comes with effusive quotes from John Irving and Alice Sebold has to be pretty good. - Observer (Best Summer Reads 2014)Johnston's excellent debut is primarily a literary novel, with old-fashioned virtues such as rich characterisation, strong structure and impeccable control of tone. Although it is reminiscent of John Updike, the mixture of summer heat and melancholy feels peculiarly Texan - The Sunday TimesJohnston has an ear for tidy phrases that pinpoint the elegiac in ho-hum domesticity, noting how blinds "ladder" light on to a bedspread or how, looking at Justin's sad father, an elderly widow would "like to sop him up with a biscuit". It's a suspenseful, uplifting portrait of a family in crisis. - ObserverRemember Me Like This is certainly a page-turning read but more than that it's a subtle analysis of what the minutiae of ordinary life might be like when people find themselves in an extraordinary situation for which there's no rule book. - Daily MailJohnston, who directs the creative writing program at Harvard, isn't going to retell the story of a child's murder or a family's grief-fueled incineration. Instead, Remember Me Like This is the more emotionally subtle tale of a child's unexpected return and a family's complicated recovery... What happens after the cable news hysteria fades away, and the mayor issues a proclamation and the tearful grandparents fly back home? Are these rare families like lottery winners who celebrate in public and then, in the months that follow, squander their good fortune? This is the question Johnston explores with great tenderness in Remember Me Like This. Eric and Laura must relearn the motions of normal life, a life without psychics' tips, sponsored races and police updates. And normalcy proves much more difficult than anyone in this family anticipated. This portrayal of a family struggling through what should be its happiest moment is tremendously moving... there's real humanity in Johnston's writing, and it's heartening to spend time with these folks as they relearn how to be a family. Rendered in these compassionate, candid chapters, theirs is a struggle that speaks to those of us who have endured far less - Washington PostA powerful, complex and affecting debut. - Shortlist