Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2006.

Costa Book Awards 2006 Judges' comment:  "This delightful book about the friendship between two boys in Ecuador is full of tall tales and fantasy.  The line between reality and bizarre fiction is always blurred, always mesmerising."

Synopsis

The Amnesia Clinic is an extraordinary, powerful novel set in Quito, Ecuador. Anti, a quiet English boy, strikes up a friendship with flamboyant local classmate Fabián. Fabián is everything Anti isn’t: handsome, athletic and popular. What’s more, he lives with his cool, eccentric Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents.

Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales, and before long, the relationship between them becomes one conducted entirely through the medium of storytelling.

One subject is taboo: Fabián’s parents. But when details surrounding their disappearance begin to emerge, Anti decides to console his friend with a story suggesting that Fabián’s mother may be living at a bizarre hospital on the coast for patients with memory loss. With confused emotions and reality losing its tenuous grip, the boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an ‘Amnesia Clinic’ that may, or may not exist…

About the Author

James Scudamore was born 1976. He lives in London. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation