Imagine Me Gone (Reprint) (Paperback) (Adam Haslett)

About the Book

When Margaret's fiancae, John, is hospitalized for depression, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. What follows is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic, and the story of how, over the span of decades, his younger siblings--the responsible Celia and the tightly controlled Alec--struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled existence.

Book Synopsis

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?

When Margaret's fiancée, 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. She decides to marry him.

Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. 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.

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.

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.

"Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization"-Wall Street Journal

"Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone, Haslett has reached another level."-New York Times Book Review

Review Quotes

"An aching, psychologically astute novel . . . Michael is the animating spirit of the book and its central conundrum, a figure at once half-deranged and brilliant, stymied and restless, utterly self-absorbed and yet pseudo-empathetic to the point of pathology . . . Imagine Me Gone confronts the moment when the motion finally stops, when the mind's wheels spin and squeal against the skull until a person breaks apart, his family looking on helplessly, haunting him and haunted by him."--Jessica Winter, BookForum

"Haslett's latest is a sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John's abiding depression and anxiety....This is a book that tenderly and luminously deals with mental illness and with the life of the mind....In Michael, Haslett has created a most memorable character. This is a hypnotic and haunting novel." --Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Succeeds on just about every level that a book can...It's a stunning novel, written with compassion, and it ends where it has to-Haslett is a fearless writer, refreshingly unafraid to confront darkness. That's not to say there's no light in Imagine Me Gone; it is, in the end, a book about love and about survival. And it's unquestionably one of the truest and most beautiful novels of 2016."
--Michael Schaub, LitHub

"The family Adam Haslett has created in Imagine Me Gone feels as true and as complex as our own actual families are, and lays nearly as deep a claim upon our love and loyalty. The eldest son, Michael, is simply one of the finest characters I've ever come across in fiction. This beautiful, tragic novel will haunt you for the rest of your life and you will be all the more human for it."--Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winner for Tinkers

"This novel about family, love, forgotten music, and a despair that proves unbearable has one of the most harrowing and sustained descriptions of a mind in obsessive turmoil and disrepair that I've ever read. Haslett is a marvelously lucid and intelligent writer." --Joy Williams, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Quick and the Dead

"This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five, from the parents' engagement in 1963 through a father's and son's psychological torments and a final crisis....Each chapter is told by one of the family's five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch....Haslett shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them....As vivid and moving as the novel is, it's not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he's so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish."--Kirkus (Starred Review)

About The Author

Adam Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, and the novel Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize.

His books have been translated into eighteen languages, and he has received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, the PEN/Malamud Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He lives in New York City.