The Amnesia Clinic

Jul 23, 2025 12:45 PM

Author:James Scudamore

The Amnesia Clinic

Anti, a quiet English boy living in Quito, Ecuador, strikes up a friendship with flamboyant classmate Fabián, who is everything Anti isn't: handsome, athletic and popular. What's more, he lives with his rakish Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents.

Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales, and before long their relationship becomes one conducted entirely through the telling of tales. One subject, however, is taboo: Fabián's parents. But when details surrounding their disappearance begin to emerge, Anti decides to console his friend with a story suggesting that Fabián's mother may be living at a bizarre hospital on the coast for patients with memory loss. With confused emotions and reality losing its tenuous grip, the boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an 'Amnesia Clinic' that may, or may not exist.

The Amnesia Clinic won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Reviews

An inventive debut

—— Herald

Scudamore has produced a clever, witty and believable debut. A fantastic read

—— Caroline Gibb , Scotsman

A polished debut... Turns the tables on both characters and readers as imagination segues into dangerous reality

—— Guardian

Scudamore has fun blurring the edges of truth and fiction, creating fantastic and colourful stories within stories

—— Laurence Phelan , Independent on Sunday

Bewitching...Highly recommended. Scudamore has talent to burn

—— Matt Thorne , Sunday Telegraph

A wonderful debut - witty, polished, fluent and effortlessly entertaining

—— Hilary Mantel

A nostalgic, compelling adventure laced with black humour

—— Time Out

A compulsively readable novel about the seductiveness of storytelling... Both his characters and the electrifying manner in which Scudamore writes about Ecuador demonstrate the appeal as well as the danger of any fabulist's capacity for wonder

—— Literary Review

Honest and beautifully written

—— Woman & Home

Witty, pacy and immediately engaging

—— Glamour

Enchantingly clever

—— Penny Vincenzi

So fluid, the pages turn themselves

—— Daily Mirror

Irresistible comfort read

—— Glamour

It would be a hard heart indeed that remained unmoved . . . the tender feelings that Noble engenders in her readers are to be cherished

—— Daily Express

Tissues are essential. You'll ricochet between delicately watering eyes at the romance of it all and howling sobs at the unbearable tenderness

—— Heat

An ambitious conflation of fact and fiction

—— Literary Review

Samantha Hunt's fantasy comes closer than any biography to solving the riddle of Tesla's commercial and personal failings ... The Invention of Everything Else is perfect for nights spent in the wrong hotel, once your travel plans have, as usual, gone subtly awry

—— New Scientist

a fascinating blend of fact, fiction, history and dare I say, science fiction surrounding the weird and wonderful life of Nikola Tesla the acknowledged father of radio and AC electricity.

—— Dovegreyreader

her portrait of Tesla buzzes with vitality

—— Metro

This unusual novel skilfully interweaves the story of the eccentric inventor of radio and AC electricity with that of Louisa ... a compelling novel.

—— Emma Lee-Potter , Express

A sophisticated pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, melodrama, and historical anecdote....It all adds up to a precocious math of human marvel

—— Elle

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