National Network for Equitable Library Service

Malcolm Firth is an aging hairdresser whose partner, Denis, in the late stages of Alzheimer's, has become inexplicably anti-Semitic. Alison, his young suburban protege, has never heard of the Holocaust. When Alison notices a tattoo on the arm of one of her older clients, and then one of her gay friends is brutally murdered by a group of skinheads, she is soon propelled on a harrowing journey into a world of hate and confusion. Haunted by the death of her friend, she wanders the rings of a psychological and spiritual inferno, bringing the slowly declining Malcolm with her. Her obsession takes them to post-communist Poland where they struggle to reconstitute the past in the killing grounds of Auschwitz. How do we remember our history? Why are the same cruelties repeated through time? These are the urgent questions that underpin this powerful first novel from one of Canada's most fearless and celebrated writers. 'A History of Forgetting' is a most compelling book. Caroline Adderson is a virtuoso conjurer of the human condition