Education-B.A., Swarthmore College M.F.A., University of Iowa J.D., Yale University.Raised-Oxfordshire, England, UK Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA.With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives. Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings-the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec-struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. When Margaret's fiance, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. Haslett’s prose, so finely adapted for each of the characters, seems to do just this, honouring the living and the dead and rendering life precious.From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most? There is a lot about honour and care here: about what it means to honour and care for both ourselves and those we love. my two days of reading the book felt less like a reading experience than a life experience: two days of terror and loss. As in Faulkner, each of the voices emerges from somewhere between speech, thought and writing, but here the characters are articulate enough that we can believe that the words are theirs. Haslett has a great gift for capturing the strikingly different inner worlds of his characters and rendering them in beautiful prose.

But there is still a contemporary social critique at work: notably of the pharmaceutical industry and the frightening debts doctors allow vulnerable patients to incur. There seem to be conscious shades of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as the narrative is told by alternating members of the family who even narrate their own deaths. Imagine Me Gone makes the elemental American landscapes of the previous novel the setting for a more classical tale of family struggle.

Imagine me gone book