The Beautiful Fall – Hugh Breakey

Published By: Text Publishing
Pages: 368
Released On: 30/09/2021

Every 179 days Robbie forgets everything. He knows this because last time it happened he wrote himself a letter explaining it. The disorientation. The fear. The bizarre circumstances imposed by the rare neurological condition he lives with. To survive the forgetting – to cope with his recurring loss of identity – Robbie leads a solitary, regimented life. Lives alone. Speaks to no one if he can avoid it. Works to complete a strange herculean task set for him by his former self.

And then, twelve days left before his next forgetting, Julie invades his life. Young, beautiful – the only woman he can ever remember meeting, As the hour draws near, Robbie is forced to confront the fact that his past is very different from how he had imagined it. And when Julie reveals her own terrible secret, he must find a way to come to terms with the truth about himself.

*****

Thanks to Text Publishing for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

An odd but interesting premise – the idea of your memory being wiped every six months, how on Earth would you cope with that? Not knowing would be fine, but our protagonist knows his memory is short lived. In the meantime, he spends his time setting up tends of thousands of dominoes, and lists after a delivery driver.

I will admit, I didn’t enjoy this to start with, finding it a little slow and very confusing. It did pick up and Breakey gets us to question who we are as people, especially if we have no past to cling onto.

As odd as it’s premise sounds, I would categorise this as a romance novel – one unlike anything I’ve read previous. Unfortunately I didn’t care for either of the main characters, they were a bit bland for me, and to be honest, I didn’t think it went anywhere for a book that’s almost 400 pages.

An enjoyable read but I wouldn’t make anyone rush to buy it.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: