Well a quartet of Oranges not bad, but I must come clean about my reading experience with The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey, shortlisted by the judges but not by me.
It's a novel about a man's journey through Alzheimer's, all those memories and identity becoming elusive. Jake's an architect and the plan is on the drawing board in front of him but he can't recall what he's supposed to be doing with it, you know the sort of thing, walks in the room and can't think why he's there.
So I made a promising start, a good seventy pages or so which is usually plenty for a book to become well-established in my mind and I was certainly eager to carry on. Then life, Scottsboro and Blonde Roots etc intervened and when I picked it up again I just couldn't get back into it. I couldn't for the the life of me really remember what had happened...or where the plot had got to...to be honest I was confused. I felt sure in the next chapter Jake would probably forget where he'd parked his car and I'm always doing that, so that was that.
I quickly shoved it back on the pile as 'given up on' in the hope it wouldn't be shortlisted and now look, I've been caught out.
With apologies to Samantha Harvey, I'll try again.


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