Jeffrey Moore - The Memory Artists

Praise for The Memory Artists

Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize

Shortlisted for the Sunburst Award

Shortlisted for the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

Shortlisted for the WordsWorthy Award

Combines smartness with wisdom Almost absurdly inventive.

David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas ,

in The Daily Telegraph Books of the Year review (U.K.)

The Memory Artists is wonderful. Rich and humane, a repository of culture worth remembering, and a moving elaboration on the simple truth that we should do good for others.

Colin McAdam, author of Some Great Thing

A model of inventiveness.

Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)

All the hallmarks of [Moores] fiction are here. They include an ability to create engaging characters, and a fine balance of warmth, insight and eviscerating humour.

The Independent (U.K.)

Ingenious mesmerizing reading it is like immersing oneself in a warm bath of words and ideas. There are many rich nuggets buried in The Memory Artists .

The Gazette (Montreal)

A journey of fleeting moments and repetitive scenes, juxtaposing various shades of recollection with a dance of words The Memory Artists is a marvel.

Edmonton Journal

All the ingredients of an entertaining, seductive mystery Moore repeatedly displays his ability to draw characters through subtle gestures.

Quill & Quire

Infused with the same wit, verve and zany imagination that energises Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain The sections that deal with Stellas Alzheimers are wonderfully written and genuinely moving.

Literary Review of Canada

Complex, ambitious structure Moore should be commended for his inventiveness.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Virtuoso wit Pythonesque (as in Monty, not lethal serpent) crawling with tragic irony.

Mirror (Montreal)

A hilarious yet poignant book about a young genius trying to deal with his mothers Alzheimers Entertaining and intelligent.

Flare

Ingenious A brainy follow-up to Red-Rose Chain .

Montreal Review of Books

A novel that pushes at the edges of expectations [that] dares to be different.

Edmonton Journal

The winner of the Commonwealth Prize has again proven his talent for wry commentary Moores clever, complicated construction testifies to his ability and broad imagination.

Winnipeg Free Press

Dazzlingly learned The results of Moores novelistic experiments are the more interesting for being unpredictable.

Books in Canada

Twisted, tragicomic and extremely entertaining The Memory Artists is one of those few novels that can pack humour, pathos, satire, love, friendship, hope and cynicism all in one volume Like Life of Pi , The Memory Artists is one of those tales too fantastic to be true, yet so convincingly told that we can almost believe it. By turns puzzling, heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, Jeffrey Moores witty prose will leave the reader out of breath at the end, wondering what the hell just happened.

The Link (Montreal)

Moores comic genius is undisputed The oddball relationship between the son who cant forget and the mother who cant remember is fraught with hope and laughter Ribald and compelling, the humorist is always erudite and there many hilarious sequences that left me aching for more.

Hour (Montreal)

Jeffrey Moores characters are brilliant and infuriating. Despicable and seductive. The Memory Artists is one of the few contemporary novels I plan to read again.

The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)

A metafictive puzzle box, a carefully structured collage of narrative voices The novel is a delight Challenging, often beautiful, and frequently inspired narrative play.

Straight (Vancouver)

Genuinely moving.

The Vancouver Sun

The story is unforgettably human [It] leaves the reader spellbound.

Scotland on Sunday (U.K.)

It is not often that I truly cannot decide whether a tale is fact or fiction Jeffrey Moore uses Noels genius and synaesthesia to offer beautiful descriptions of luridly coloured (and memory dysfunctional) characters, as well as his experience of his mothers disease to portray the agony of watching a loved ones inevitable decline. He also finds time to delve into the sometimes murky world of medical research and comment on the role of medicine as an interface between science and art Wonderfully intense.

The Lancet (U.K.)

There is a warmth and hopeeven lovethat infuses the relationships between the characters, all in their different ways locked in their personal prisons.

Morning Star (U.K.)

A challenging book, bristling with scientific and literary references from Feynman to Baudelaire by way of Nietzsche and Rossetti, this will not fail to make a huge impact.

The Good Book Guide (U.K.)

PENGUIN CANADA

THE MEMORY ARTISTS

Born in Montreal, JEFFREY MOORE was educated at the University of Toronto and the Sorbonne. He works as a translator and lectures at the University of Montreal. He was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for his first novel, Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain , which has been optioned by Valkyrie Films.

Also by Jeffrey Moore

Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain

The Memory Artists

Jeffrey Moore

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 2004 Published in this edition, 2005

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Jeffrey Moore, 2004, 2005

Lines from Calmly we walk through this Aprils day: Delmore Schwartz, Selected Poems.

Copyright 1959 Carcanet Press Limited. Reprinted by permission.

A version of was broadcast on CBC Radio and published in Matrix as Delight in Disorder.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which lastyear invested $21.7 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada, qui a investi21,7 millions de dollars lan dernier dans les lettres et ldition travers le Canada.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.