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“Imagine a zombie apocalypse where instead of becoming undead, people lose their shadows and, along with it, gradually lose their memories. This intense, heartbreaking, and beautifully-written book follows multiple characters on their search for hope in a hopeless world. I love what they did with the narration of this book. It fits perfectly with the story and creates more of an emotional pull for the listener. An amazing, amazing book!”
— Colleen • An Unlikely Story
Bookseller recommendation
“Very good audio, keeps you pulled in. Great for fans of "Station Eleven."”
— Julia • The Bookloft
Bookseller recommendation
“Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M is as mysterious as it is fantastical. Beginning in India before spreading worldwide, almost like a magical epidemic, people are suddenly losing their shadows. For those that do, it always follows that they begin to forget. Whether slowly or rapidly, the forgetting always befalls those who have become “shadowless.” And in this new world of forgetting and mis-remembering, the natural world also goes under a metamorphosis: giant “death kites” patrol the skies, the Statue of Liberty terrorizes all of New York, and wolves begin to speak like humans. All this and more befalls the world amid the landscape of lost memories. Chilling, heart-warming, thrilling, and mesmerizing are all the ways I would describe The Book of M. Narrators James Fouhey and Emily Woo Zeller do wonderfully for the audio book adaption. Emily is touching as the first-person narration of female character Max, while James’ handling of the third-person narrations of the rest of the cast is a remarkable feat.”
— Nicholas • Mysterious Galaxy Books
Brad Thor's Summer 2018 Fiction Pick for THE TODAY SHOW!
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Elle • Refinery29 • PopSugar • Verge
""Eerie, dark, and compelling, [The Book of M] will not disappoint lovers of The Passage and Station Eleven."" —Booklist
WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER?
Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.
Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.
Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, and Mexico City.
Her second novel, The Cartographers, became a national bestseller, was named a Best Book of 2022 by The Washington Post, and received a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her debut, The Book of M, won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, as well as a best book of the summer by the Today show and NPR’s On Point.