In a house on Maple Street, where time has suddenly come to a standstill, 82-year-old Eileen Hart discovers that her kitchen clock is missing its minute hand. It's the first in a series of impossible occurrences: sunflowers growing six feet tall overnight, mirrors that predict movements before they happen, and hallways that shrink when she isn't looking.
When a middle-aged man named David arrives at her door claiming to be the son she never had—complete with DNA evidence and a hospital bracelet from 1963—Eileen must confront the possibility that her memories are not just fading, but have been deliberately forgotten. As the boundaries between past and present blur, Eileen finds herself attending her own funeral, visiting her dead husband in the hospital, and planting gardens she has no memory of tending.
"The Clock Forgets Me" is a mesmerizing exploration of memory, time, and the lengths we go to to protect ourselves from painful truths. Set in a small Wisconsin town where reality itself has become negotiable, this literary novel with elements of magical realism delves into the complex territory of protective amnesia and the psychological mechanisms we employ to shield ourselves from grief.
For readers who treasured the emotional depth of "Still Alice" and were captivated by the imaginative wonder of "The Midnight Library," Brunell's novel offers a unique third space, where dementia becomes not just a medical condition but a metaphorical landscape for exploring how identity persists even as memory fails.
At once heartbreaking and hopeful, "The Clock Forgets Me" asks profound questions: Do our choices retain their meaning when we can no longer recall making them? Can love endure when its history has been forgotten? And what grows in soil that remembers the seeds it's held, even when the gardener does not?
While Eileen's story stands powerfully on its own, this novel introduces readers to the first installment in Brunell's innovative "Memory Keepers" universe—a series of interconnected yet independent works exploring the metaphorical landscapes of memory, time, and identity. Each forthcoming book will introduce new characters and settings while expanding on the transformative framework of magical realism established here.
With exquisite prose and deep empathy, Raymond Brunell crafts a story that will resonate with anyone who has loved someone through memory loss, anyone who fears being forgotten, and anyone who wonders what remains when the stories we tell ourselves begin to unravel.