Michael L. Printz Award-winning novelist Marcus Sedgwick (She Is Not Invisible) moves away from his young adult roots for a psychologically complex mystery that explores the nature of memory in shaping identity and personal history.
Marcel Després is a cabaret performer who murdered his wife and has been imprisoned at Salpêtrière Asylum under the care of Dr. Morel. Marcel's case, while open and shut with his confession, piques the curiosity of police Inspector Laurent Petit, who seeks to investigate Marcel's crime against the wishes of his superiors. Flashbacks reveal how naiveté has put Marcel in his current predicament: the man born with a perfect memory fails to hold down an adult job due to his constant "daydreaming"--until he scores a cabaret act as Mister Memory in the seedy underbelly of Paris. There, Marcel meets and marries the beautiful dancer Ondine, whose sordid past unravels their marriage and leads to further intrigue and destruction.
Sedgwick's story develops as a cinematic fairy tale that plays "forward and backward, left to right and back again and each and every time feeling everything he felt at that time, as if it were happening to him over again, for real." Marcel's memory becomes the focal point of the story, the centerpiece from which to explore the pliability of recall and its role in influencing the interpretation of truth for the characters.
"It is only the story we make by linking such moments together, and the narrative that creates, that gives us any meaning, that gives us personality." --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant