From the author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air, an emotionally stirring novel that examines how history imprints itself upon our hearts and minds
Every day, the bomber exerts an effect on my body. He’s the most influential person in my life. He turns around and around my consciousness, like a twig trapped in an eddy. And perhaps his—and my—only hope of escape is if I ease the currents of my rational mind and dream him into being, let him slip into the flow of my lived experiences.
In 1987, fifteen-year-old Simon Hanlon was present when an IRA bomb exploded at the Remembrance Sunday parade in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. In the aftermath of the blast, he began having seizures, which soon abated. But now, after more than thirty years, they have returned to him again.
From his apartment in Chinatown in New York, where he awaits a brain operation that could render him unable to recall memories or form new emotions, Harlon finds himself compelled to turn back to his younger self, to seek out the bomber from the remnants of his childhood, to free himself from the guilt of his origins, to find an answer to the question: what makes a person want to harm another?
