Book Description
Brad Thor's Summer 2018 Fiction Pick for THE TODAY SHOW!
 
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Elle • Refinery29 • PopSugar • Verge
 
Author of LA Times Prize finalist The Cartographers
 
“The Book of M is devastating and inventive as Shepherd examines the value of memory, packing in imaginative twists as she goes.” —USA Today
 
"Eerie, dark, and compelling, [The Book of M] will not disappoint lovers of The Passage and Station Eleven." —Booklist
 
WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER?
 
Set in a dangerous dystopian world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
 
One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
 
Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.
 
Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up what little time he has left with the love of his life. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
 
As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
 
Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.
 
About the Author
Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, and Mexico City.
 
She is the nationally bestselling, award-winning author of All This and More, The Cartographers, and The Book of M. Her novels have been acclaimed as a "Best Book of the Year" by the Washington Post, a "Best Book of the Summer" by the Today Show and NPR, and featured in the New York Times, the LA Times, The Atlantic, and on Good Morning America, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Her work also has been translated into more than ten languages, and optioned for TV and film.