Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Book of M
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://pengshepherd.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2017074367 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017074367 |
| HEADING: | Shepherd, Peng |
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| 001 | 10631376 |
| 005 | 20171215092404.0 |
| 008 | 171215n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2017074367 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3619.H4574 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Shepherd, Peng |
| 373 | __ |a New York University |
| 375 | __ |a female |
| 670 | __ |a The book of M, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Peng Shepherd) data view (Peng Shepherd’s fiction has been published in the Weird Lies anthology, Litro Magazine, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, among other places. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, and was awarded an emerging writers grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation based on an early draft of her novel) |
PERSONAL
Born in Phoenix, AZ.
EDUCATION:New York University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Elizabeth George Foundation, emerging writers grant.
WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including Weird Lies, in periodicals, including Litro Magazine, and in broadcasts on BBC Radio.
SIDELIGHTS
Peng Shepherd’s first novel, The Book of M, is a dystopian tale of a global phenomenon that starts with people losing their shadows. Sometimes it happens to random individuals, sometimes to whole cities at once. At first people treat it as a curiosity. Then, however, those who have lost their shadows begin to lose their memories, something that becomes known as “the forgetting.” It follows that the things they cannot remember cease to exist or are irrevocably changed. The world becomes chaotic, with violence breaking out between the shadowless and the shadowed; meanwhile, there are rumors of a man with the power to heal shadowlessness. Shepherd focuses her story on a husband and wife, Ory and Max, who have taken refuge in an empty hotel in Virginia to avoid the plague. They find out they are not protected, though, as eventually Max loses her shadow. She and Ory try to postpone the forgetting; he finds a tape recorder so she can preserve her memories before they vanish. Then, one day Ory returns to the hotel from one of his periodic expeditions for food and other provisions, and Max has disappeared. He ventures out into the strange new world in hopes of tracking her down. Shepherd tells the story from the viewpoints of both Max and Ory, as well as several other characters.
“The Book of M was actually inspired by a real-life phenomenon known as Zero Shadow Day,” Shepherd told Sean Tuohy at the Writer’s Bone website. “It turns out, every year on a certain day in India, everyone’s shadows actually do disappear—for just a few minutes. I knew that I wanted to write something that involved shadows because they’re eerie and mysterious, but when I came across Zero Shadow Day in my research, I was so fascinated that I had to make it the start of the story.” In the book, one man never regains his shadow after Zero Shadow Day, beginning the plague of shadowlessness, which then spreads to others. To another online interviewer, Samantha Nelson at Unbound Worlds, Shepherd explained how she developed the story from there. “As I started working, I felt like people couldn’t just lose their shadows,” she said. “It had to mean something to lose your shadow. It had to cost something. I was thinking as I was writing ‘What is also like a shadow? What is something about a person that seems really integral and permanent?’ What I came up with was memory. If you lost either one of those things, would you be yourself anymore? That’s how that connection came about.”
Several reviewers thought Shepherd had created a fascinating work of post-apocalyptic fiction. “The Book of M is a beautiful, tragic yet thoughtful book,” remarked Ana Grilo, writing online at Book Smugglers. Its “greatest strengths,” she related, are “the conversations it has with regards to identity, sense of self and history” and the unreliability of the narrative Max records on tape. BookPage contributor Stephenie Harrison called the novel “instantly absorbing … a scary, surprising, sad and sentimental story that will be deeply felt by readers.” In Booklist, Alison Spanner dubbed it “eerie, dark, and compelling.”
Some critics expressed reservations. At the Fantasy Book Review website, Emma Davis praised the novel’s first half, saying: “The situation is perfectly pitched, so realistic in the way each new piece of information is passed around the world, from person to person, with video clips uploaded and scrutinised, all kinds of rumours whispered.” The book “loses its cohesion” halfway through, she maintained. “Each narrator’s story descended into a surreal dreamscape, with only tenuous links to their original goals, and their sense of urgency to do whatever the hell it is they wanted to do lost its power,” she commented. Revathi Suresh, writing in India’s Hindu newspaper, also found The Book of M disjointed. “An attempt is made to link all this brain-addling to a myth, a story about a shadow dislocated from its owner, and the memories of elephants, the connection so slight that the dots don’t join at all,” Suresh observed. Medium online reviewer Zachary Houle offered a mixed assessment. Like Davis, he deemed the book’s first half stronger than the second, reporting that “by the mid-way point, things start getting sillier and sillier.” He did allow that the novel “is impeccably well-written and is literary dystopian fiction in the vein of Station Eleven.” On the whole, Houle related, The Book of M has “a crackling good start, a ponderous mid-section and an unintentionally hilarious finale.”
Still others saw much to admire in the book. At the Bustle website, Sadie Trombetta called it “a beautiful and haunting story about the power of memory and the necessity of human connection … a post-apocalyptic masterpiece and the one dystopian novel you really need to read this year.” Real Book Spy, online contributor Ryan Steck wrote of Shepherd: “The universe she created is stunning. The way she describes things and sets the scene is incredible.” He “absolutely loved” the novel, he added. A Publishers Weekly critic summed up The Book of M as “graceful and riveting, slowly peeling back layers of an intricately constructed and unsettling alternate future.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2018, Alison Spanner, review of The Book of M, p. 21.
BookPage, June, 2018, Stephenie Harrison, “Don’t Forget about Me,” p. 19.
Hindu, July 21, 2018, Revathi Suresh, review of The Book of M.
Publishers Weekly, April 2, 2018, review of The Book of M, p. 40.
ONLINE
Book Smugglers, https://www.thebooksmugglers.com/ (September 11, 2018), Ana Grilo, review of The Book of M.
Bustle, https://www.bustle.com/ (June 7, 2018), Sadie Trombetta, “’The Book of M’ by Peng Shepherd Is a Powerful Post-Apocalyptic Masterpiece About the Power of Memory.”
Fantasy Book Review, http://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/ (September 28, 2018), Emma Davis, review of The Book of M
Medium, https://medium.com/ (June 8, 2018), Zachary Houle, review of The Book of M.
Peng Shepherd website, http://pengshepherd.com (October 29, 2018).
Real Book Spy, https://therealbookspy.com/ (June 5, 2018). Ryan Steck, “Five Questions with Peng Shepherd.”
Unbound Worlds, https://www.unboundworlds.com/ (July 19, 2018), Samantha Nelson, “Peng Shepherd on Lost Shadows and Memories in The Book of M.”
Writer’s Bone, http://www.writersbone.com/interviewsarchive/ (May 30, 2018), Sean Tuohy, “10 Questions with The Book of M Author Peng Shepherd.”
Bio
Photo by Rachel Crittenden
Peng was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet. She earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. The Book of M is her first novel.
Quoted in Sidelights: “The universe she created is stunning. The way she describes things and sets the scene is incredible.” \“absolutely loved”
THE BOOK OF M: Five Questions with Peng Shepherd
Peng Shepherd The Book of M.jpg
Talk about a can’t-put-it-down debut thriller!
I had no idea, whatsoever, what this book was about when I first go it, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M is special. It’s really good. Like, really good.
Think of Joe Hill’s The Fireman, but better. Shepherd’s book novel has all the good elements of Hill’s book and none of the bad. The universe she created is stunning. The way she describes things and sets the scene is incredible. Expect vivid, stimulating descriptions that puts you shoulder-to-shoulder with Ory and Max, the co-leads of this twisty thriller where people around the globe start losing their shadows, and then their memories.
Though her book just came out yesterday (Tuesday, June 5th), the very talented debut author was kind enough to take the time to go on the record for our Five Questions segment, and I asked her about everything from how her personality is similar to her characters to what her next book is about. Read the full Q&A below, then make sure to order your copy of The Book of M, now available wherever books are sold.
TRBS: I absolutely loved The Book of M! How did you come up with the story idea, and how long did it take you to write this book?
Shepherd: Thank you! The Book of M was an idea that had been bouncing around in my head for years, but I didn’t know how to approach it until only recently. I really wanted to write a story that had something to do with shadows, because shadows are so eerie and mysterious, but I didn’t have much more than that. I finally turned to research and started collecting art, folktales, and other tidbits about shadows from as many cultures as I could find, and that’s when I came across a real-life phenomenon called “Zero Shadow Day.” It turns out, every year on a certain day in India, everyone’s shadows actually do disappear—for just a few minutes. As soon as I discovered that, I started writing with a fury, and the novel poured out of me. I finished the first draft in nine months, revised for six more, and then the book went out on submission.
TRBS: One of the things that makes this story so great is the vast universe you’ve created for Ory and Max to wander around in. What’s it like to create your own universe, and is it more fun or challenging to actually sit down at a keyboard and bring your fictional world to life?
Shepherd: It was definitely both fun and challenging, but I think mostly fun. You really can do anything you want to do in an invented universe, which is very thrilling, and I think in some ways just a little easier than writing a story set within a recognizable reality or place. When you do that, you have rules you have to follow and facts you might not be able to change, or you might start to lose readers familiar with those things and places. Building an environment from the ground up is only limited by your imagination and dedication.
TRBS: How much of Max (and even Ory) is based on you? What characteristics and traits do you share with your main characters, and how are you different. . . besides the fact that you (hopefully!) haven’t lost your shadow.
Shepherd: Not one bit, actually! Both Ory and Max feel like such separate, unique people from me. They arrived fully formed, and when I started writing them it really felt more like I was meeting them than like I was creating them. There are probably little dashes of myself or my friends and family in some of the minor characters, but as for the main cast, they were really not inspired by anyone from my life at all. They’re completely themselves.
TRBS: This story, the way you’ve written by putting so much into the visual detail, reads like it’s tailor-made for the big screen. Do you have anything to report on the potential movie front, and who would be your dream casting choices to play Ory and Max?
Shepherd: There have been some rumbles, but nothing official yet (fingers crossed, though!). As for dream casting, that’s a tough question! There are so many great choices. I’m a big fan of both John Cho and Steven Yeun’s work and think either of them would make an excellent Ory. For Max, Zoe Saldana and Sonequa Martin-Green have acted in some amazing sci-fi movies and TV series lately and would do an awesome job of bringing Max’s fierce determination to life.
TRBS: Lastly, now that The Book of M is hitting bookstores, what’s next for you?
Shepherd: I’m in the very early stages of the first draft of my second novel. It’s too soon to say exactly where it’s going yet, but there definitely will be more strangeness and mystery.
Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet. She earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University, and has lived in Beijing, London, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. The Book of M is her first novel. You can sign up for her official newsletter here, and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Praised as “one of today’s finest book reviewers” by New York Times bestselling author Gayle Lynds, Ryan Steck (“The Godfather of the thriller genre” — Ben Coes) has “quickly established himself as the authority on mysteries and thrillers” (Author A.J. Tata). He currently lives in Southwest Michigan with his wife and their six children.
Quoted in Sidelights: “The Book of M was actually inspired by a real-life phenomenon known as Zero Shadow Day,” Shepherd told Sean Tuohy at the Writer’s Bone website. “It turns out, every year on a certain day in India, everyone’s shadows actually do disappear—for just a few minutes. I knew that I wanted to write something that involved shadows because they’re eerie and mysterious, but when I came across Zero Shadow Day in my research, I was so fascinated that I had to make it the start of the story.”
10 Questions With The Book of M Author Peng Shepherd
Photo credit: Rachel Crittenden
Photo credit: Rachel Crittenden
By Sean Tuohy
Memories can be difficult to hold onto, but what happens when they’re ripped completely away from you? Are you still the same person?
With her debut novel The Book of M, author Peng Shepherd dives into a post-apocalyptic world where those questions take on a terrifying urgency.
Shepherd spoke to me recently her debut novel, how her writing process starts off messy, but ends with a great finished product, and, of course, the importance of memory.
the-book-of-m-book-cover.jpg
Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be a storyteller?
Peng Shepherd: I think I always did, truly. When I was five, I was already trying to make my own books, which my mother would get bound and then give back to me. It was sometimes hard to find time to write in university and when I first started working, but the breaks never lasted for long—I just loved it too much.
ST: What authors did you worship growing up?
PS: Ursula K Le Guin has always been and will probably always be my biggest source of inspiration. Her books were life changing for me, and are among my favorites of all time. There’s another writer too, Michael Kurland, who wrote Perchance: The Chronicles of Elsewhen, which was the first book to make me realize I loved and wanted to write specifically science fiction and fantasy stories. I still have my original copy of that book, which I think is long out of print now, and it’s one of my most treasured possessions.
ST: What is your writing process?
PS: It starts out messy—when I first have an idea, I’m too excited by the newness of it to plan anything, and end up churning out a bunch of possible scenes and settings and chapters that don’t always match or make much sense. After about 50 pages of this “exploration,” as I like to call it, things calm down a little, and I can see the bigger picture. At this point, I try to think of an ending, and if I can figure that out, then the rest of the story starts to fall into place.
ST: What inspired The Book of M?
PE: The Book of M was actually inspired by a real-life phenomenon known as Zero Shadow Day. It turns out, every year on a certain day in India, everyone’s shadows actually do disappear—for just a few minutes. I knew that I wanted to write something that involved shadows because they’re eerie and mysterious, but when I came across Zero Shadow Day in my research, I was so fascinated that I had to make it the start of the story.
ST: What attracts you to the post-apocalyptic setting?
PE: I think post-apocalyptic settings are fascinating because they’re able to ask, in sometimes much more direct ways than other genres, what it means to be human. When all the constraints and systems are removed, who do we become? Is it more true, or less?
ST: How much of yourself went into the character of Max?
PE: None at all, actually! There are a few other minor characters that have little bits of me or people I know in them, but funnily enough, Max always felt to me like completely her own person—almost more like I met her rather than created her.
ST: What is the importance of memory in The Book of M?
PE: The idea of memory is really the heart of The Book of M. It’s something we don’t think about most of the time, but memories are such an integral part of a person. They tell us who we are, and what matters most to us. In the story, the characters face situations again and again where they have to decide if their memories are worth more to them or if they would give them up in exchange for something else—and if so, which ones? And would they still be themselves afterward? While writing the book, it made me reflect on the things I value most in my life and what I would do to preserve them, and hopefully readers will be moved to do the same.
ST: What’s next for you?
PE: I’m in the very early stages of working on a second novel. I’m still figuring out exactly where it’s going, but I think it’s going to be a mystery, and set in our present day world this time—with just enough strange occurrences and seemingly impossible moments that the only explanation might be magic.
ST: What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
PS: As frustrating as this advice is, you just have to write. There’s no way to get better at something without a lot of practice, and writing is no different. There’s also no way to finish a book without actually writing it, either.
ST: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?
PS: I’m obsessed with yaks, the animal. It’s become a long-running joke among my friends, who buy me yak stuffed animals or send me pictures of yaks whenever they come across one. They’re just so adorable.
To learn more about Peng Shepherd, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
Tagged: Peng Shepherd, The Book of M, William Morrow, writing, writers, publishing, books, fiction, science fiction, apocalyptic
Quoted in Sidelights: “eerie, dark, and compelling.”
The Book of M
Alison Spanner
Booklist.
114.18 (May 15, 2018): p21. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Book of M.
By Peng Shepherd.
June 2018.496p. Morrow, $26.99 (9780062669605).
Hemu Joshi was the first to lose his shadow, on Zero Shadow Day as it later became known. As he stood in the streets of Mumbai for all to see, the world became fascinated with the shadowless man. Television channels live-streamed him; thousands made the pilgrimage just to be near the unexplainable. Untethered to the world, Joshi became a sign to many that they would all soon transcend to a higher existence. Then he started to forget--his family, the days of the week, how to eat--everything. When others began to lose their shadows, the curiosity turned into a worldwide epidemic, sparing no one. Cities were shut down and violence broke out as shadowless people attacked the shadowed, and what was known about the world changed as the Forgetting spread. Shepherd's near-future-set first novel flashes between the early days of the epidemic and the current story of Ory and Max, a couple trying to escape it. Eerie, dark, and compelling, this will not disappoint lovers of The Passage (2010) and Station Eleven (2014).-- Alison Spanner
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Spanner, Alison. "The Book of M." Booklist, 15 May 2018, p. 21. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541400783/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=1bc60f95. Accessed 28 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541400783
1 of 4 9/27/18, 11:12 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Quoted in Sidelights: “instantly absorbing … a scary, surprising, sad and sentimental story that will be deeply felt by readers.”
Don't forget about me
Stephenie Harrison
BookPage.
(June 2018): p19. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE BOOK OF M
By Peng Shepherd
Morrow, $26.99, 496 pages ISBN 9780062669605, audio, eBook available
Imagine a world in which shadows are more than simple physical phenomena that occur whenever light strikes a surface. What if our shadows were the guardians of all our memories and the core essence of who we are? What kind of darkness might descend upon the earth if one day people's shadows suddenly began to vanish without an explanation, taking with them biographical details and threatening to unravel reality? This is the terrifying premise of Peng Shepherd's outstanding and unforgettable The Book of M.
Our guides to this dystopian future are Ory and his wife, Max, who have quarantined themselves in a mountain lodge in Virginia while the mysterious plague of shadowlessness gradually sweeps across the planet. Despite all their safeguards, Max has recently lost her shadow, and it is only a matter of time before she begins to lose herself. In an attempt to stave off her forgetting, Ory gives Max a tape recorder to act as a repository for her memories. However, one day Ory returns from a scavenging trip to discover Max gone, prompting him to venture into a savage, chaotic world on a desperate and foolhardy mission to reunite with her. Even if the day should come when Max no longer remembers him, Ory knows he will never be able to forget or give up on Max.
Shepherd has constructed an exceedingly thoughtful and clever story that is perfectly paced and intricately plotted, producing a narrative filled with a genuine sense of urgency, thrilling twists and jaw-dropping revelations. Instantly absorbing, The Book of M is a scary, surprising, sad and sentimental story that will be deeply felt by readers while capturing their imaginations and hearts.
Readers shouldn't be surprised if the only times they can bear to put this book down are when they feel the need to confirm that their shadows are still firmly intact.
REVIEW BY STEPHENIE HARRISON
2 of 4 9/27/18, 11:12 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Harrison, Stephenie. "Don't forget about me." BookPage, June 2018, p. 19. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540052002/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=9fab9333. Accessed 28 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540052002
3 of 4 9/27/18, 11:12 PM
Quoted in Sidelights: “graceful and riveting, slowly peeling back layers of an intricately constructed and unsettling alternate future.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Book of M
Publishers Weekly.
265.14 (Apr. 2, 2018): p40. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Book of M
Peng Shepherd. Morrow, $26.99 (496p) ISBN 978-0-06-266960-5
An apocalyptic future in which an epidemic dubbed the Forgetting robs large swaths of the world's population of their shadows and memories--causing them to work dangerous magic--sets the scene for Shepherd's exciting debut. Husband and wife Ory and Max have been holed up in an abandoned hotel outside Arlington, Va., for two years, living hand-to-mouth off beef jerky and scavenged goods, and hiding from the predatory world outside, where the shadowless wreak havoc and misremember the old world into a new one (in one instance, a shadowless forgets what a house looks like; it is rebuilt with its roof on the floor). Then Max's shadow disappears. The couple devises protective rules, and Ory gives Max a tape recorder to document her memories. But when Max escapes, Ory sets out on a terrifying journey to find her. He is beset by enraged shadowless with electric guts; joins a book-collecting, shadowed army; and meets archer Mahnaz, who has a fascinating backstory of her own. Ory and Max separately gather stray rumors of a mythologized figure chasing a cure for shadowlessness in New Orleans, though it's uncertain whether they'll reach the city without dying. Though its characters sometimes slide into tropes, Shepard's debut is graceful and riveting, slowly peeling back layers of an intricately constructed and unsettling alternate future. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Book of M." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 40. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555579/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=31bc7f25. Accessed 28 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533555579
4 of 4 9/27/18, 11:12 PM
Quoted in Sidelights: “The situation is perfectly pitched, so realistic in the way each new piece of information is passed around the world, from person to person, with video clips uploaded and scrutinised, all kinds of rumours whispered.” The book “loses its cohesion” halfway through, she maintained. “Each narrator’s story descended into a surreal dreamscape, with only tenuous links to their original goals, and their sense of urgency to do whatever the hell it is they wanted to do lost its power,”
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
The Book of M book cover
Free preview
Rating 6.0/10
Parts are exquisitely written, with focused attention to the tiniest details of character and place.
Just like Peter Pan, the people in Peng Shepherd’s novel, The Book of M, are having trouble with their shadows. For reasons that never become known, shadows are disappearing, sometimes from an individual, sometimes whole cities at once. Told by four linked characters, with a multitude of diverse experiences threaded through their stories, this book follows their course through a world fundamentally changed by destructive magic.
If you’d asked me any time during the first half of this book what the final star rating would be, I would have said 5. Easily. There is an intriguing introduction to our main narrators, their distorted normality revealing that in the ‘now’ of their world something is very wrong. Flashbacks within each tale take the reader to the start of it all, when shadows were first lost. Initially, people are stunned, but excited- it’s a whole new phenomenon, something inexplicable and even wondrous. One shadow gone, then a group here, and another there. It’s newsworthy and everyone’s talking about it. Scientists are baffled. Religion is called into play. Anyone who’s anyone has an opinion and wants to know more. At this point, so did I. The situation is perfectly pitched, so realistic in the way each new piece of information is passed around the world, from person to person, with video clips uploaded and scrutinised, all kinds of rumours whispered. When things start to go wrong, when people without their shadows begin to forget, the tentative panic and fear is equally genuine. Just like an outbreak of some unknown virus, people are quarantined and studied. Then the overriding question, ‘why is this happening’ shifts to ‘how can we stop it’ as the violence and terror overwhelms everything.
What becomes clear is that The Forgetting is more than just memory loss, the inability to remember what was or what is allows the shadowless to create their own reality. And it is chilling. If a shadowless doesn’t remember a whole marketplace? Well then, it’s gone. What happens when you can’t remember how to use your front door? Eventually it disappears and you remain, stuck until you waste away in a box of your own creation. And if you forget to breathe? Death. The picture of a world destroyed builds with each horrifying possibility, many of which stopped me in my tracks because I’d never considered it could go like that… This new place is a twisted, nightmare reality of clashing memories and monstrous creations. Of course, the author plays hard and fast with any notion of rules. What about all the people that remembered the market? If you can forget a place or person and it disappear, why would not remembering you need to breathe kill you, since not breathing would be the new reality? Anyway, who cares, this bit was brilliant. Especially as all the usual pathways of societal disintegration in dystopian fiction is exacerbated to a ridiculous and wildly fun degree by this one hook.
Then at the halfway point it loses its cohesion. All of a sudden, it felt slow and I had to force myself to pick it up again. Each narrator’s story descended into a surreal dreamscape, with only tenuous links to their original goals, and their sense of urgency to do whatever the hell it is they wanted to do lost its power. In fact, the whole book from this point was convoluted and bloated with unnecessary sidelines that read like creative writing exercises, shoehorned in to fulfil the requirements of the final battle for New Orleans. Yes, an actual magical battle. The book morphs from dystopia to fantasy, from humanity facing a crisis to a city ruled by a blind man with an elephant shadow. Seriously. And that doesn’t even cover the kick in the teeth by the way it all ends for the ‘M' from the title. The sheer randomness feeds into the mounting feeling of pointlessness and disappointment.
More than most dystopian fiction, this aims for literary adroitness, and for the most part, achieves it. Parts are exquisitely written, with focused attention to the tiniest details of character and place. But just because you’ve allowed magic into your world, doesn’t mean you can go crazy with it. The author lost sight of both the characters and the plot in her desire to play tricks. Any time you wonder at the logic or likelihood of path taken, the answer is MAGIC. But the essential problem with disconnecting people from themselves, each other, and the world around them is that you remove the emotion that goes alongside. By the end, even by halfway, there was none left. Ultimately, this is a book about forgetting that will be easily forgotten.
ARC via Netgalley
This The Book of M book review was written by Emma Davis
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Quoted in Sidelights: “The Book of M is a beautiful, tragic yet thoughtful book,” “greatest strengths,” “the conversations it has with regards to identity, sense of self and history”
Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.
Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
Stand alone or series: Stand alone
How did I get this book: Bought
Format (e- or p-): Print
Review
If you lose all of your memory are you still you?
I read The Book of M months ago and have been sitting on this review since then because I didn’t know quite how to talk about it: how to describe it to start with, then how to organise my feelings and thoughts about the novel. On the former, I think I settled on Fantasy Post-Apocalyptic Horror as a good description of the genres it covers; as to the latter, I absolutely loved it. It feels like the most unique thing I have read of late, reminding me of the excitement I felt when I read The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.
How does it all start?
Well, with a real-life fact: have you heard of Zero Shadow Day? Zero Shadow Day is an astronomical phenomenon that happens in locations between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn when, for a brief period of time, minutes really, those places are perfectly aligned with the sun and NOTHING HAS SHADOWS. Then, the Earth continues it rotation and the shadows return, life carries on.
The catastrophic events that take place in The Book of M start just after one of those Zero Shadow Days in India, when one man’s shadow never comes back. At first, this is seen as a trivial yet-interesting event. But then the man starts forgetting things. At first, he forgets about small, seemingly inconsequential stuff, then bigger and more impactful memories are gone, his address, his mother’s face, his own name. The day he forgets about the market where he is now living is the day things start to change: the whole market and the people on it disappear completely. Gone from reality.
And then other people’s shadows start vanishing.
The world collapses: when the people on it can’t hold on to their memories and effectively to themselves, reality is fundamentally – and literally – altered. The Forgetting ends the world as it once was.
Meanwhile, years after The Forgetting happened, Max and Ory are a loving married couple living the apocalypse out alone in the middle of nowhere, making do. But Max has just lost her shadow. She has started forgetting. So one day she takes off on her own, because she can’t bear to think about the day she will forget Ory because that will be the day when she will make him disappear from existence. Mas brings with her a tape recorder, which she will use in order to keep her memories for as long as she can.
Ory comes back from a hunting trip to find Max gone, he thinks she just forgot where they were based and he takes off after her.
But they go in separate directions. Their narratives alternate, running apart from one another until inevitably theirs lives and narratives will intersect once again.
Meanwhile, there is a man though whose shadow never disappears but whose memory was lost in a car accident way before The Forgetting. His true north is finding out how to restore people’s memories – or at least turn those who forgot into functioning members of society again. He eventually settles down in New Orleans with his followers. Word is out there he may have found a cure.
If you lose all of your memory are you still you? Are you worth saving no matter what?
Going back to my first paragraph, I did say this book is rather unique – and it certainly is. And this is actually a huge feat because most of the novel really is just a post-apocalyptic road trip and we all have seen those: people being their best and their worst when shit hits the fan so monumentally. Although there is nothing new about that or about the horrors that ensue, the fact that the novel is firmly set on a Fantasy sphere is what makes it different: the shadows’ disappearance, the memories and The Forgetting and the eventual “cure” that the mysterious man finds all intermingle in an interesting Fantasy package.
However, to me, the novel’s greatest strengths come first, from the conversations it has with regards to identity, sense of self and history; secondly, with how part of the narrative, the one from Max and her recorder, is so unreliable due to how she starts forgetting little by little everything about life, the universe and herself.
The Book of M is a beautiful, tragic yet thoughtful book and all of its darkness and sadness have stayed with me, just as its hopefulness did too. Without a shadow (eh) of a doubt, one of my top 10 reads of 2018.
Rating: 9 – Damn near perfect.
Buy the book
Quoted in Sidelights: “by the mid-way point, things start getting sillier and sillier.” He did allow that the novel “is impeccably well-written and is literary dystopian fiction in the vein of Station Eleven.” On the whole, Houle related, The Book of M has “a crackling good start, a ponderous mid-section and an unintentionally hilarious finale.”
Go to the profile of Zachary Houle
Zachary Houle
Book critic, Fiction author, Poet, Writer, Editor. Follow me on Twitter @zachary_houle.
Jun 8
Peng Shepherd
A Review of Peng Shepherd’s “The Book of M”
Shadow of a Thought
“The Book of M” Book Cover
When I was in Grade 9, the book on the curriculum for my advanced-level English class was Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. The book is about a young wizard who loses his shadow and takes off to fight it so that it doesn’t do irreplaceable harm as it gallops all around the world doing evil deeds. I’m going to spoil the ending of that book here but spoil it I must. Instead of a final confrontation with the shadow, the wizard winds up grafting the shadow back onto himself through magic. The reason I bring this up is because everyone in my class thought this ending was a huge cop-out, including me. The teacher desperately tried her best to show the class why it was the only possible ending, and it was a good one. Still, for a class weaned on Hollywood action films, the ending to A Wizard of Earthsea was not the preferred ending we would have liked to have seen. It needed more bang for the buck, a final showdown where the shadow was vanquished.
Funny that I mention A Wizard of Earthsea in reviewing The Book of M, because the two novels are joined at the hip in subject matter: losing shadows. In The Book of M, society has broken down entirely as people all around the globe start losing their shadows permanently. Thus, it is with no irony that I report that a major character of this work is named Ursula in honour of a particular author. (Ahem!) However, the story really centers on a married couple named Maxine and Orlando, who are holed up in a remote hotel in Virginia. Maxine suddenly loses her shadow at the outset of the novel, and this is a bad thing because those who lose their shadow go on to lose their entire memory — thus, the shadowed and the shadowless are in perpetual war with each other. So Max decides to leave the hotel so that she doesn’t hurt Ory, as he’s also known as, by the effects of losing the shadow. You see, the shadowless also have this curse of transmuting everyday ordinary objects and living things into weapons as they start to forget. Despite the dangers involved, Ory takes off after Max, but is headed in the opposite direction. It turns out it doesn’t matter too much because there is a mysterious figure in New Orleans, an amnesiac who lost his memories just before everyone else started losing their shadows, who is gathering things — people or other materials — for some special purpose. Like moths to a flame, the story eventually starts tugging the characters towards New Orleans.
That’s a lot to summarize, and I’m probably not doing the book much justice. The reason is because this is a deeply layered book. Once you’ve figured out what’s happening to the characters and what something might mean, another layer is revealed and more questions are asked than are answered. Those who love brain puzzles will find much enjoyment in The Book of M, which is impeccably well-written and is literary dystopian fiction in the vein of Station Eleven. Alas, the book eventually does not succeed in holding one’s interest because, at almost 500 pages, it is overlong and, by the mid-way point, things start getting sillier and sillier. Peng Shepherd, the book’s author (making her debut here), has a penchant for writing her characters into corners that are inescapable, meaning that they have to rely on magical powers that they don’t really know that they have to break free of their confines. There are plot twists that you don’t see coming, but they, too, may make your eyeballs roll. Elephants also play a large role in this book, and, when you find out why, you may groan in disbelief. Also, there’s a climax, but it feels too muted and the enemy too easy to fight off. It feels a bit like a riff off that other book I was just talking about.
Even though The Book of M never elevates itself as a good first novel by someone still figuring out how to write a novel, there are pluses with this work. The biggest is that the characters are delightfully multi-ethnic — Max and Ory are a racial intermarriage — and the LGBTQ community has a large role to play in the work. Most of these characters are three-dimensional, real people, and Shepherd has skillfully fleshed them out. Indeed, the characters may be themselves the biggest draw of the novel, because the settings — mostly in the United States — do not feel fully realized. It’s hard to imagine what the setting might be like if you haven’t been the particular places that the author has visited, which is peculiar for a book that is as long as this. There are trade-offs to be had, for sure.
All in all, I found The Book of M to have a crackling good start, a ponderous mid-section and an unintentionally hilarious finale. It is an average book, at best. Still, it’s worthy of a good beach read if you’re looking for one, as you don’t have to really think about it too much — except when it gets a little too outlandish for its premise. (The Statue of Liberty attacking New York City. Really?) It is an entertaining book. With a little pruning and a little more attention paid to the setting and the magical realist aspects of the premise, The Book of M would have been a stand-out read. What’s here is merely adequate. However, maybe I feel this way because I wasn’t enchanted with A Wizard of Earthsea when I was 14 years old. Maybe I didn’t like this book as much as I should have because I’m still bitter when it comes to books about shadows been ripped from one’s body. It’s a good concept. Now someone has to execute it so that the resolution to these stories have a bit more zip and pow to it, and not merely having the reader sigh at the finish, “Oh, come on! That’s it?”
Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M was published by William Morrow Books on June 5, 2018.
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Go to the profile of Zachary Houle
Zachary Houle
Book critic, Fiction author, Poet, Writer, Editor. Follow me on Twitter @zachary_houle.
Quoted in Sidelights" “a beautiful and haunting story about the power of memory and the necessity of human connection … a post-apocalyptic masterpiece and the one dystopian novel you really need to read this year.”
“a beautiful and haunting story about the power of memory and the necessity of human connection … a post-apocalyptic masterpiece and the one dystopian novel you really need to read this year.”
BySadie Trombetta
June 7 2018
Every once in a while, you come across a book so alluring, so addicting, so utterly irresistible, it makes you want to forget the world around you and continue to exist in those delicious moments of reading it for the first time. For me, Peng Shepherd's breathtaking debut novel The Book of M is that book. A beautiful and haunting story about the power of memory and the necessity of human connection, this book is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece and the one dystopian novel you really need to read this year.
In a near future world, a man at an outdoor spice market in India suddenly loses his shadow, a phenomenon scientists cannot explain. But as people around the globe watch, fascinated, from their TV screens, he unexpectedly begins to lose something else, too: his memories. Unable to recognize his own brothers or remember who his mother is, the shadowless man is ushered to a medical facility to be studied, but soon, he isn't the only one afflicted.
In communities all around the globe, people's shadows disappear, and in their place come strange and unfathomable abilities that threaten humanity's very existence:
"Then it spread further. The ones left all started forgetting too, and disappeared. Wandered right out of their houses and couldn't remember how to get back, or died of starvation in one room, unable to figure out how to unlock a door or that there was an upstairs, until the doors themselves vanished from the walls and the stairs flattened to hallways, trapping them forever. How to get back to a shelter, how to use a can opener, that rain existed. Who would have thought that you'd need a shadow to work a key or recall your mother's name?"
Hidden in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods, Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting for two years, but they have seen plenty of its consequences: chaos, destruction, heartbreak, and death. They are alone, starving, and cut off from the rest of the world, but they are safe — that is, until one day Max loses her shadow and runs away before she can hurt the husband she loves. Determined to find her no matter the cost, Ory sets out on a perilous journey rife with unknowable threats and unexplainable magic to find a woman they may have already forgotten he even exists.
As they travel separately across an unrecognizable world, Ory and Max face everything from murderous bandits and sinister cult leaders to shadowless kings and shadowed war generals, but somewhere out there, there is a strange new force growing that might just save them all.
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd, $16, Amazon
A thought-provoking novel that combines the emotional urgency of a love story with a dash of magic and the dangerous thrill of a post-apocalyptic world, The Book of M is stunning debut from a talented new author. Whether she is writing about India, Iran, Boston, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., or somewhere in between, Peng creates a rich atmosphere and distinct sense of place that brings her upside down world to life before her readers' eyes. Even better than her unique dystopian world building are Peng's dynamic and diverse characters, each one on a different quest: for survival, for love, for redemption, for salvation. Their intertwining journeys, across time and across the world, paint a vivid picture of memory's crucial role in loving, in living, and in humanity.
As Max says into the tape recorder she keeps around her neck to help her remember, the price of forgetting isn't just heartbreaking — it can be deadly:
"I thought it was for the best, my love. Leaving home. You would know that by now if you could listen. I didn't want you to see me this way. I didn't want you to have to live with whatever was left. And if the worst thing happened, if I forgot you, I didn't want to be the reason that you died or disappeared — or turned into something that wasn't you. I couldn't be the reason. You would've done the same thing for me, and you know it."
That nail-biting tension, that fear of forgetting, runs throughout The Book of M to create an emotional page-turner in which you're invested in each and every character's ending.
But what truly makes The Book of M such a sublime novel is its storytelling. Peng's layered narrative follows not only the moving love story of Ory and Max, but so many other incredible stories — of two sisters willing to risk their own lives to save the other, of a heartbroken widow who finds himself general to an army in a bloody war, of a troubled amnesiac attempting to harness the power of memory to find a cure for forgetting — all of them gripping and powerful in their own unique ways. Peppered throughout are also tales of magic and myth, religious allegories, legends, folktales, each one a kind of collective memory.
A brilliant and beautiful debut, The Book of M is a provocative novel that will force you to contemplate not only the power of memory, but the very nature of it. What if, as the book suggests, they are "something we somehow can move or share. Maybe not all of them, but at least one. One memory. One thing that always stays, across time and space." What memory would it be?
Quoted in Sidelights: “As I started working, I felt like people couldn’t just lose their shadows,” she said. “It had to mean something to lose your shadow. It had to cost something. I was thinking as I was writing ‘What is also like a shadow? What is something about a person that seems really integral and permanent?’ What I came up with was memory. If you lost either one of those things, would you be yourself anymore? That’s how that connection came about.”
Peng Shepherd on Lost Shadows and Memories in The Book of M
By Samantha Nelson
July 19, 2018
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Editor's Note
Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet. She earned her MFA in creative writing from New York University, and has lived in Beijing; London; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; and New York City. The Book of M is her first novel.
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Photo by Matthew Ansley on Unsplash
The end of the world in Peng Shepherd’s debut novel The Book of M begins on Zero Shadow Day, a holiday celebrated in parts of the world when the earth’s rotation causes all shadows to disappear for a few minutes each year. Shepherd imagined what might happen if some of the shadows didn’t come back, setting off a mysterious plague that causes people across the globe to lose their shadows and then their memories. As more of the world forgets what a deer should look like or what happens when a gun fires, those things start to change, making everything more dangerous for the shadowed and shadowless alike. Shepherd spoke to Unbound Worlds about her fascination with shadows, the importance of names and what she’d pack if she has to leave Earth.
Unbound Worlds: What interests you about memory?
Peng Shepherd: My interest in the book didn’t start with memory. It was more about the shadows. As I started working, I felt like people couldn’t just lose their shadows. It had to mean something to lose your shadow. It had to cost something. I was thinking as I was writing “What is also like a shadow? What is something about a person that seems really integral and permanent?” What I came up with was memory. If you lost either one of those things, would you be yourself anymore? That’s how that connection came about?
UW: Where did the idea for people losing their shadows come from?
PS: I think I have always thought they were really cool and eerie. I remember being a kid when I didn’t really understand how shadows worked I used to play games with my shadow. I’d try to outrun it or trick it. I’d see if I could do something to catch it off and have it would do something different from me. After growing up I understand how shadows work and that it’s impossible for me to do that, but the idea and magical feeling that it could have done something different stayed. I always wanted to do something with that.
UW: How long did you live in Washington, D.C. and what was it like writing about its destruction?
PS: I lived there a little over two years. I don’t want to say it was fun because I was destroying the world, but it was fun. The two main characters are hiding out in an abandoned hotel, but the whole time I was imagining them being in my tiny old apartment. To this day, when I picture those scenes I still picture my apartment.
UW: Indian culture, Hindu mythology and a pair of elephants play a big role in the book. How much research into those did you do?
PS: I did a little. I wanted to make sure that I was as accurate as I could be. I read a couple of the myths and I researched quite a lot about the elephants to make sure I got their details right. I also did some research on Zero Shadow Day, which is a much more modern thing that also happens in India.
PS: How did you decide to integrate Zero Shadow Day?
UW: It was really the thing that kicked [the book] off. Until I read about that, I just had this idea that I wanted to do something about shadows because I thought shadows were cool but I didn’t have a story. I didn’t have characters. I was kind of spinning my wheels. I would write stuff and throw it away and write stuff and throw it away. I decided to go back to researching because I realized it wasn’t ready. Then I stumbled upon Zero Shadow Day and that’s what made me have a story.
UW: How did you decide to connect the loss of memory with the ability to do magic?
PS: It’s already kind of magical to lose your shadow and that’s causing you to lose your memories. I thought about what it would be like if you were a person in that situation, you were having pieces of you pulled away slowly and were still lucid enough to know that you were missing things but not know what you were missing, or maybe you know what you’re missing but not how it should be. When that happens in our own real life, usually we try to make something up to substitute or to explain it. I think that’s a really human, natural thing to do. I thought if you were in this magical, surreal situation where you were losing memories and then you were trying to replace them yourself what would happen? The magic ended up being that whatever you tried to replace it with by misremembering would kind of manifest that new thing.
UW: How did you keep track of your cast of characters and keep them feeling distinct and real?
PS: I kind of wrote one at a time for the four points of view in the book. As I was revising, I’d do a revision for each person and read only that point of view all the way through. That helped me make sure that they felt like a real, complete person because [the book] does jump back and forth so much.
UW: You have two love stories within The Book of M. How did you try to reconcile the way relationships work and the end of the world as we know it?
PS: It felt like it went together to me. If you were struggling not to lose your husband or your wife it kind of feels like the end of the world so the two situations felt like they mirrored each other really naturally and I just kind of went with it.
UW: How did you try to tie identity to names?
PS: That was really important to me. There are a couple of shadowless characters who, as they start to forget themselves, decide to give up or have already forgotten their names they used to have like Jennifer or Michael and they start going by a word that they think will remind them of the thing that means the most important to them. One renames himself Played Violin and another one renames himself Wifejanenokids. I think they just realize their names didn’t actually mean that much to them and it was other things in their lives that did. If they could hold onto something it wouldn’t actually be their name, it would be who they were.
UW: What made you decide to make New Orleans a very important destination for the book?
PS: There’s a fair amount of magic in the book and a lot of weird and wonderful stuff that happens and even through it starts in India, most of the action in the later story takes place in the U.S. When I realized as I was writing that a good chunk of the story was going to be set in the U.S. it just kind of felt inevitable, in a good way. There’s no other place that such magical strange things could happen in the U.S.
UW: Was being an author part of the inspiration for making the saving of books so important to the characters?
PS: I don’t know if it has to do with me as an author or just me as a reader. I love books so much. If I was in that sort of situation or on a spaceship leaving Earth for the last time, books are some of the things I would put in my tiny, tiny backpack of the only things I was allowed to take.
UW: What are you working on now?
PS: It’s a big mess. I have started a second novel but I’m still in the really early stages and it’s also a learning process for me. I’ve never written a novel while having another one come out. It’s been difficult to figure out how to divide my time and control my nervousness and excitement about the first book so I can focus on the second book. I am really excited about it and I hope to be able to finish the first draft soon.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “An attempt is made to link all this brain-addling to a myth, a story about a shadow dislocated from its owner, and the memories of elephants, the connection so slight that the dots don’t join at all,”
‘The Book of M’ review: A grave new world
Revathi Suresh
July 21, 2018 16:00 IST
Updated: July 21, 2018 18:42 IST
‘The Book of M’ review: A grave new world
more-in
With its violence and gore, this should have been a video game
A few years ago, I came out of a screening of a Hindi film called Shaandaar feeling hungover. Like I’d been willy nilly made part of someone else’s drug-induced experiment.
The Book of M gave me déjà vu. I read it quickly, finding it unputdownable not because I thought it particularly gripping — frankly, there were times I just wanted to lay it down and forget about it — but because I was never sure what the heck was going on and I just wanted to get it.
Told from multiple points of view, the novel is what one might call dystopian fantasy fiction.
One fine day people all around the world, starting in India, begin to lose their shadows and thereafter their memories, creating the worst kind of chaos, and soon dividing and subdividing into demented factions of the shadowed and the shadowless. All of this madness is compounded by the fact that the shadowless start modifying the world around them to suit their new reality so that the world keeps morphing according to how those individuals see it. It is never clear why some people lose their shadows and others don’t.
A tiny fraction of the book is set in India (small details will set your teeth on edge) but most of the action takes place in the U.S., where, from survival drama it transforms into an elaborate road trip replete with violence and gore that will put any video game to shame. In fact, that’s what the book really should have been. It’ll probably be a movie coming to a theatre near you instead.
An attempt is made to link all this brain-addling to a myth, a story about a shadow dislocated from its owner, and the memories of elephants, the connection so slight that the dots don’t join at all.
Sometimes I felt like what I was reading was entirely within parentheses with everything outside it gone missing. I found myself reading and worrying all the time if the ungettableness of the book was just me. To make it worse even the end offered no explanations, only a new babaji-type leader for the new world order.
The writer is the author of Jobless Clueless Reckless, a novel about teenagers.
The Book of M; Peng Shepherd, HarperCollins, ₹599
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