ISBN: 9780062416094

From New York Times bestseller and National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates, a taut and fascinating novel that examines the mysteries of human memory and personality as they are bound… More...

From New York Times bestseller and National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates, a taut and fascinating novel that examines the mysteries of human memory and personality as they are bound up with the most mysterious phenomenon of alllove In 1965, a young research scientist named Margot Sharpe is introduced to Elihu Hoopes, an attractive, charismatic amnesiac whose short-term memory has been devastated by a brief illness. Charming, mysterious, and deeply lonely, Eli is tortured by his condition. Trapped eternally in the present moment, he is also haunted by a fragmented memory from his childhood: the disturbing image of an unknown girl's body, floating under the surface of a lake. Inspired and moved by her exceptional patient, Margot dedicates her professional life to him and, in so doing, establishes for herself an exceptional career in the rapidly expanding field of neuroscience. But where is the line between scientific endeavor and personal obsession? And how to interpret the wishes of a person who is trapped outside time? Atmospheric and unsettling, The Man Without a Shadow is a poignant exploration of loneliness, ethics, passion, aging, and memoryintricately, ambitiously structured and made both vivid and unnerving by Oates's eye for detail and her searing in Praise for Joyce Carol Oates "Oates's precise and inspired writing is close to witchcraft."Jeanne Moreau "Joyce Carol Oates . . . is simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious, and creative writer going, as far as I'm concerned."Gillian Flynn "What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was like life itself." The New York Times Book Review "No writer today has today has delved into the mysterious circumstances of being alive at this time in Americaexplored our entire social stratato the extent that she has."The Nation "A writer of extraordinary strengths . . . she has dealt consistently with what is probably the great American themethe quest for the creation of self. . . . Her great subject, naturally, is love."The Guardian sight into the human psyche. Media >, [PU: Harper & Row; Collins; HarperCollins]<