Memories of the Future

Written by Siri Hustvedt

Narrated by Katherine Fenton

From the internationally best-selling, Man Booker Prize-long-listed Siri Hustvedt comes a provocative, exuberant novel about time, desire, memory and the imagination, which tells the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbour, Lucy Brite.

As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S. H. transcribes her neighbour's bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one night when Lucy bursts into her apartment to rescue S. H. from a frightening situation.

Forty years later, S. H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook along with drafts of a never-completed novel at her mother's house. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S. H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year, creating a dialogue between selves across decades and reframing the past in the present.

Urgently paced, intellectually rigorous, poignant and often wildly funny, Memories of the Future brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous relation between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger and rage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette UK Audio
• Release date: Mar 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781473694446

Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English literature and is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, The Blindfold, and The Summer Without Men, as well as a growing body of nonfiction, including Living, Thinking, Looking, A Plea for Eros, and Mysteries of the Rectangle, and an interdisciplinary investigation of the body and mind in The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. She lives in Brooklyn.