First published 2021
Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie sits at his desk, one of seven elderly trustees of Temple Academy for Boys, a school that closed thirty-four years ago. He writes his memoir of those distant days, struggling with fading memory and present distractions. The school carried a quiet anti-Semitism that Lloyd recalls uneasily as he explores his own family history, particularly his famous cousin Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the celebrated archaeologist. His memories center on Ben-Zion Elefantin, an enigmatic older student who claimed ancestry from Egypt's Elephantine Island. Lloyd reconstructs their childhood encounter while wrestling with the gap between his family's archaeological legacy and the prejudices that shaped his youth. Ozick weaves myth into memory as Lloyd grapples with how time transforms our understanding of the past.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, antiquities
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Elephantine Island, Temple Academy for Boys
Period: 1930s, 1980s
192 pages · Hardcover · Knopf