The Memory Tree

A heartbreaking story of love and evil. Sam Ellis is a middle-aged stock broker living in Seattle, successful, married to a woman he dearly loves, with everything he could want. But below the surface, there are scars. Then his world changes. For reasons he doesn't understand, Sam is thrust back in time to 1968, the summer he turned thirteen. He meets his parents and his own childhood self. That summer changed Sam's world. Monsters walked the streets of his hometown, and now Sam will come face to face with those monsters again, this time as an adult. Nothing will ever be the same.

The desire to revisit one's past and tweak a relationship or erase a bad decision has inspired an entire subcategory of time-travel fiction. In Little's first novel, the power of temporal revision arrives not by choice but by sheer happenstance when middle-aged stockbroker Sam Ellis finds himself intermittently dissolving out of the present and into the summer of his thirteenth year. Unaccountably stranded back in his hometown of Nelson, Montana, for days at a time, Sam has little choice but to pass for a wayward businessman, rent out a room, and eventually confront his own emotionally disturbed parents. Yet the familial encounters not only unearth more than a few long-buried memories, including disturbing episodes of sexual abuse, but yield an opportunity to right a wrong that has scarred Sam's marriage and resulted in the death of a childhood friend. Little's elegantly crafted, stripped-down prose sustains a quietly powerful meditation on the ghosts of memory and will appeal to anyone harboring a secret yen to exorcise childhood demons. Carl Hays
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