In this taut and fascinating novel, the bestselling, New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of The Sacrifice, The Accursed, and Lovely, Dark, Deep examines the mysteries of memory, personality, and identity and pierces the enigmatic force that drives human lives—love.
In
1965, neuroscientist Margot Sharpe meets the attractive, charismatic
Elihu Hoopes—the “man without a shadow”—whose devastated memory, unable
to store new experiences or to retrieve the old, will make him the most
famous and most studied amnesiac in history. Over the course of the next
thirty years, Margot herself becomes famous for her experiments with E.
H.—and inadvertently falls in love with him, despite the ethical
ambiguity of their affair, and though he remains forever elusive and
mysterious to her, haunted by mysteries of the past.
The Man Without a Shadow
tracks the intimate, illicit relationship between Margot and Eli, as
scientist and subject embark upon an exploration of the labyrinthine
mysteries of the human brain. Where does “memory” reside? Where is
“love”? Is it possible to love an individual who cannot love you, who
cannot “remember” you from one meeting to the next?
Made vivid by her exceptional eye for detail and her keen insight into the human psyche, The Man Without A Shadow
is a unique story of forbidden love, a kind of secret, evolving
marriage, depicted in Joyce Carol Oates’s tight, impassioned prose. It
is an uncanny, ambitious, and structurally complex novel that penetrates
the mind and illuminates the heart.