AUGUST 2018 - AudioFile
With no warning, people around the world start losing their shadows. At first, this phenomenon is fascinating, but then the awful truth emerges: Once people lose their shadows, all of their memories—their entire selves—vanish, too. James Fouhey and Emily Woo Zeller narrate the story of Ory and Max’s fight to survive in the aftermath of the forgetting epidemic. Fouhey’s gravelly, measured voice captures Ory’s grim resolve and perfectly conveys the stark, brutal world of Shepherd’s imagined landscape. Zeller’s depiction of Max, a woman helplessly sliding into oblivion, is chilling. Her narration of the desolation and heartbreak of this broken land is piercing and real. This haunting story, narrated with devastating clarity, is unsettling, thought-provoking, and utterly compelling. S.A.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
04/02/2018
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)
David Lipsky
Prepare to fall in love with your own shadow. And to lose sleep. Shepherd is urgently good, and has written one of those books that makes you look up at two in the morning, to a world that’s new, newly scary, and freshly appreciated: what all the great stories do.
Booklist
Eerie, dark, and compelling, this will not disappoint lovers of The Passage (2010) and Station Eleven (2014).”
Time
"Eerily magical . . . At the heart of the novel is a timeless question about the meaning of memory."
Popsugar
For fans of Station Eleven, this summer release will have you engulfed from beginning to end.
Bustle
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.
Christopher Brown
A beautifully written existential apocalypse, following everyday people on a search for love, memory and meaning across the richly realized and frighteningly familiar ruins of America.
Paul Tremblay
I was both disturbed and inspired by Max’s and Ory’s journey through apocalypses large and small. Peng Shepherd has written a prescient, dark fable for the now and for the soon-to-be. The Book of M is our beautiful nightmare shadow.
The Contemporary Clerk
The Book of M shines consistently, first in the sense of magical wonder that permeates each of its pages, and second, in the emotional depth that Shepherd is able to draw out of her characters... brutal and brilliant in equal measure.
Brad Thor
It is an incredible concept, and she is a brilliant, brilliant new fiction writer. This is someone who you’re eventually going to have on this couch—she’s that good.
Book Riot
Fans of Station Eleven, listen up!...This one is g-r-e-a-t.
The Real Book Spy
Beautifully written, Peng Shepherd delivers an extraordinary story about love, hope, the unquenchable search for answers that may never come, and, ultimately, survival . . . The characters all have such depth to them that it’s impossible to not become invested in the story, which twists and turns often.
Shelf Awareness
In her debut novel, The Book of M, Peng Shepherd has created a fantastical scenario where people not only lose their past but can also re-create the world any way they want . . . Shepherd’s tale pushes the post-apocalyptic story in a new and exciting direction, making readers ponder questions about reality, self-perception and relationships.
USA Today
This is an apocalyptic thriller with heart. . . . The Book of M is devastating and inventive as Shepherd examines the value of memory, packing in imaginative twists as she goes.
TheMarySue.com
Captivating . . . Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.
Toronto Star
Reminiscent of books like Stephen King’s The Stand, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Michael Tolkin’s NK3 . . . she keeps the journey interesting, makes us care about her characters, and invites us to think about how we are all the stuff of dreams.
The Nerd Daily
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.
Refinery29
Brilliant debut . . . The Book of M is right up there with Station Eleven: achingly beautiful literary novels about a changed world.
Elle
"I love a good dystopian page-turner, and Peng Shepherd’s debut novel is the real deal. . . . Shepherd mixes in elements of multiple genres, like post-apocalyptic thriller and fantasy. But at its core, it’s a meditation on memories and personhood, as Shepherd asks which one defines the other."
PBS (Arizona)
[Shepherd’s] first novel, The Book of M, tells the fantastic story of ordinary people caught up in a catastrophe in which people lose their shadows — and their memories.
BookPage (Top Fiction Pick)
Outstanding and unforgettable . . .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.
Darin Strauss
The Book of M is exciting, imaginative, unique, and beautiful. Shepherd proves herself not just a writer to watch, but a writer to treasure.
Booklist
Eerie, dark, and compelling, this will not disappoint lovers of The Passage (2010) and Station Eleven (2014).”
USA Today
This is an apocalyptic thriller with heart. . . . The Book of M is devastating and inventive as Shepherd examines the value of memory, packing in imaginative twists as she goes.
Time
"Eerily magical . . . At the heart of the novel is a timeless question about the meaning of memory."
Refinery29.com
Brilliant debut... The Book of M is right up there with Station Eleven: achingly beautiful literary novels about a changed world.
TheNerdDaily.com
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.
Arizona PBS
[Shepherd’s] first novel, The Book of M, tells the fantastic story of ordinary people caught up in a catastrophe in which people lose their shadows — and their memories.
TheRealBookSpy.com
Beautifully written, Peng Shepherd delivers an extraordinary story about love, hope, the unquenchable search for answers that may never come, and, ultimately, survival...The characters all have such depth to them that it’s impossible to not become invested in the story, which twists and turns often.
BookPage
Outstanding and unforgettable...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.
AUGUST 2018 - AudioFile
With no warning, people around the world start losing their shadows. At first, this phenomenon is fascinating, but then the awful truth emerges: Once people lose their shadows, all of their memories—their entire selves—vanish, too. James Fouhey and Emily Woo Zeller narrate the story of Ory and Max’s fight to survive in the aftermath of the forgetting epidemic. Fouhey’s gravelly, measured voice captures Ory’s grim resolve and perfectly conveys the stark, brutal world of Shepherd’s imagined landscape. Zeller’s depiction of Max, a woman helplessly sliding into oblivion, is chilling. Her narration of the desolation and heartbreak of this broken land is piercing and real. This haunting story, narrated with devastating clarity, is unsettling, thought-provoking, and utterly compelling. S.A.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
