Book review: The Forgetting Time

EVER since he could speak, Janie’s son, Noah, has been asking for his other mother. 

Sharon Guskin

Mantle, £12.99;

ebook, £6.02

Now four years old, Noah’s imaginative leaps have become progressively worse.

After the latest psychologist offers a discomforting diagnosis, Janie seeks out alternative help.

Dr Jerome Anderson walked away from a prestigious university medical residency to turn his attentions to the phenomenon of reincarnation.

Now fighting primary progressive aphasia, he decides to take up the baton for his life’s work once more.

Sharon Guskin’s debut is an incredible Russian doll of a novel, beginning as a seemingly ordinary story of maternal struggle, it unfurls into a fascinating tour of reincarnation, a compelling murder mystery, and an examination of the familial bond.

But don’t be put off by the foray into the preternatural, because, like Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, at its core it really is superb fiction. And despite its title, this is one book you won’t forget.