Hailed as “one to watch ” by the UK’s Telegraph, Sam Taylor is one of the most imaginative and innovative young writers at work today. With The Amnesiac, his United States debut, he incorporates a murder mystery and a forgotten manuscript into an exhilarating and intelligent novel. When twenty-nine-year-old James Purdew returns to England from his home in Amsterdam, it is to discover what happened during three earlier years of his life that he cannot recall. What he finds, in an old house with a tragic history, is a nineteenth-century manuscript that begins to seem less and less like a work of fiction—and more like the key to his own lost past. Memory and amnesia, fiction and reality, destiny and randomness, heaven and hell—all converge to form an engrossing gothic story that is sure to appeal to fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind.