Most of you will probably know Samantha Harvey from her Booker Prize-winning novel, Orbital, even if you have read it yet. I’ve read all four of her novels and her non-fiction book about insomnia, and I recommend them all, including The Wilderness, her debut.

Beautiful, tragic, moving. The Wilderness really deserves to be better known. The book starts as Jake, in his sixties, has a trip in a plane given as a present by his adult son, Henry. Jake’s plane flies over the prison where Henry is incarcerated. Four years later, at the end of the novel, when Henry has been released, the two men, and Jake’s girlfriend / carer look through a book of photographs. In between these two events we see, feel, experience, the unravelling of Jake’s mind as Alzheimer’s takes hold. We learn about Jake’s life with his parents, his birth, his affair, his marriage, the birth of his children and his tragedies in a series of spirals that change and fracture each time Jake remembers them – are they even memories or are they simply taken from the photographs he looks at? It’s a wonderful novel but also sometimes difficult to read, not just because of how this man loses so much as he loses his mind, but the writing is dense, sometimes unfathomable, complicated and twisty, which of course befits the subject. Recommended.

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Buy The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey from Bookshop.org.

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