Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Thriller / suspense fiction
Weblink
www.bretanthonyjohnston.com

REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS

Bret Anthony Johnston

After having been missing for almost four years, Ethan Campbell was found thirty miles away from his home, in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Since Justin Campbell's disappearance four years ago, his family has been stuck in the grooves of grief, unable to save themselves let alone one another. His mother drives an hour each way to spend time rehabbing dolphins. His father has been having an affair. And his younger brother Griff just spends day after day skateboarding in the empty pool at the deserted motel.

And then the call from the police. Justin has been found and he is okay. Though missing for so long, he's only been held across the bay in Corpus Christi, Texas, less than 30 miles away. It is a miracle.

But instead of righting the imbalances within this struggling family, Justin's return only lays bare the effects of his trauma, threatening to snap the last threads that bind the Campbells to one another. As Justin's kidnapper is set to be charged for his crime and the town of Southport prepares to welcome back the missing boy at the annual summer festival, pressure (barometric and other) builds and resolves in a spectacular denouement.

In addition to having written CORPUS CHRISTI, Johnston is also the editor of NAMING THE WORLD: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Oxford American, and Tin House. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under 35. A skateboarder for almost 20 years, he is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard.

Available products
Book Published 2014-05-13 by Random
Book Published 2014-05-13 by Random

Comments

In Remember Me Like This, Bret Anthony Johnston paints a brilliantly rendered portrait of a family in the aftermath of trauma. Beautifully crafted and so suspenseful you cannot look away, this is a novel as much about what is hidden as what is revealed; the balancing act is nothing short of masterful.

You could say that this book is ripped from the headlines, but that wouldn't be fair. Bret Anthony Johnston's riveting novel picks up where the tabloids leave off, and takes us places even the best journalism can't go. Remember Me Like This is a wise, moving, and troubling novel about family and identity, and a clear-eyed inventory of loss and redemption.

Set in a coastal town in south Texas, Bret Anthony Johnston’s first novel, Remember Me Like This (Two Roads £17.99 / ST Bookshop £14.99 / ebook £12.99), centres on a couple whose son Justin went missing four years ago. When the teenager reappears, rescued from a kidnapper, his “miraculous” return is far from being an unmixed blessing — his father, Eric, has to stop seeing his lover, his mother fails to reconnect with the boy, and the younger son feels squeezed out. The repercussions become darker when the kidnapper is released on bail, and Eric and his own father explore ways to bump him off. Despite this thriller strand, Johnston’s excellent debut is primarily a literary novel, with old-fashioned virtues such as rich characterisation, strong structure and impeccable control of tone. Although it is reminiscent of John Updike, the mixture of summer heat and melancholy feels peculiarly Texan.

His first novel is spellbinding, so moving, that one’s only complaint is that we had to wait 10 years to read it. …Johnston is a master at creating honest portraits of family members that could easily be your neighbor. Make no mistake about it: Bret Anthony Johnston is a writer to watch.

This mesmerizing story of loss and redemption on Texas's Gulf Coast will take you in and hold you and not let go until it's done with you, leaving you wiping at your eyes with the kind of soul-gratitiude that comes only after experiencing true art.

Johnston’s scenes are exquisite, the internal and external worlds kept in taut balance… [a] fully immersive novel in which the language is luminous and the delivery almost flawless. Read more...

The terror and pain of losing a child is all too well realised…The genius of this novel is its subtlety.

In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all too comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost.

Rights sold: Ambo Anthos (Dutch), Albin Michel (French), Einaudi/ Stile Libero (Italian), Two Roads/ John Murray (UK/ BC)

Remember Me Like This is a novel of emotional dexterity and purity: It reminds us that lost things can be found, but that they will be so on their own terms. And it is also a novel you finish having felt, like it or not, as the characters did -- deeply. Read more...

REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS has been named on New York Times’ 100 notable books of 2014. Read more...

There's real humanity in Johnston's writing, and it's heartening to spend time with these folks as they relearn how to be a family. Rendered in these compassionate, candid chapters, theirs is a struggle that speaks to those of us who have endured far less. Read more...

…superbly crafted…. Johnston’s success is to turn a book about an exceptional event into the macroscopic examination of the fault lines and the love that binds together an unexceptional family: ordinary people dealing as best they can with extraordinary events. … A memorable novel.

Both devastating and transporting, this is the rare novel a reader lives in, so persuasive is the impact, the insight, the heat of south Texas.

I admire the architecture of REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS, flawless storytelling. I vouch for the psychological authenticity of this depiction of any parents' worst fears. I love this novel.

I know the novel you’re looking for. It’s the thriller that also has interesting sentences. It’s the one with the driving plot but fully realized characters as well, the one that flows like it was plotted by Dennis Lehane but feels like it was written by Jonathan Franzen…….It’s a surprisingly rare breed…Fortunately, there’s Bret Anthony Johnston’s Remember Me Like This…. The book is riveting, with the elements of suspense neatly folded into an elegant series of interlocking arcs…There is nowhere you want to stop.

This is a sensitive portrait of the emotionally devastating impact of trauma upon each member of an ordinary Texan family, following their son’s abduction…. A heady novel, it blows the lid on the notion of the ‘happily ever after. Read more...