The Wilderness Samantha Harvey by Samantha Harvey 9781409075196, 1409075192, B0031RS8S0 instant download after payment.

Samantha Harvey asks a question. What will Jake be able salvage from the wreckage of his mind: beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?

It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early 60s, and he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.

"The overlap of time and place and real and imagined events can be jarring, but the result is a complex, sometimes cerebral story that at least one writer, Carolyn See, writing for The Washington Post, has compared to Virginia Woolf’s “meditative novels." The comparison seems apt. Like Woolf, Harvey is a lyrical writer invested in the psychology of her characters, what they want, why they want it and the winding paths their lives take."   -  Mary Westbrook, Fiction Writers Review

Shortlisted for the 2009 Women's Prize For Fiction

Samantha Harvey has completed postgraduate courses in philosophy and in Creative Writing. In addition to writing, she has travelled extensively and taught in Japan and lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently co-founded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.  Her first novel, The Wilderness, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the 2009 Betty Trask Prize.