First published 2023
Gaustine creates an unusual clinic for Alzheimer's patients. Each floor meticulously recreates a different decade, complete with period furniture, authentic scents, and carefully calibrated afternoon light. His unnamed assistant collects artifacts from bygone eras: 1940s shirt buttons, 1960s furniture, fragments of forgotten times. The detailed environments transport patients backward through memory. But the clinic attracts unexpected visitors. Healthy people begin seeking refuge in these reconstructed decades, fleeing present-day troubles. They treat Gaustine's facility as a shelter from contemporary horrors. The assistant watches as more people choose the past over the present. The carefully constructed historical rooms grow increasingly convincing. Then something shifts. The past stops staying contained within the clinic walls. History begins seeping into the present day, creating complications nobody anticipated. The narrator must confront what happens when escape becomes invasion, when memory becomes reality.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, psychological-thriller, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Period: 1940s, 1960s
302 pages · Paperback · Weidenfeld & Nicolson