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Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

Narrator Scott Shepherd

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Length 13 hours 42 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“In Russell Banks’ brilliant and difficult new novel, Lost Memory of Skin, we are introduced to “the Kid,” a young man who is trying to create a life for himself after having been incarcerated for his liaison with an underage girl. On probation now, he is shackled to a GPS and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, he joins a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders. Banks’ narrative eases us in slowly and deftly, and the characters become human and real. Banks shows again that he is one of the most gifted writers of our times.”
— SMC • Bookshop Santa Cruz

Summary
About the author

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.”
—Cornel West

“Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks.”
—New York Times

Lost Memory of Skin is a provocative novel of spiritual and moral redemption from Russell Banks, the author of Affliction, Rule of the Bone, Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, and other acclaimed masterworks of contemporary American fiction. Uncompromising and complex, Lost Memory of Skin is the story of The Kid, a young sex offender recently released from prison and forced to live beneath a South Florida causeway. When The Professor, a man of enormous intellect and appetite, takes The Kid under his wing, his own startling past will cause upheavals in both of their worlds. At once lyrical, witty, and disturbing, Banks’s extraordinary novel showcases his abilities as a world-class storyteller as well as his incisive understanding of the dangerous contradictions and hypocrisies of modern American society.

Fiction Mystery & Thriller Romance

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.