Tuesday 4 May 2021

✪ The Beautiful Fall ✪ Hugh Breakey ✪

 

Release date: 4th May 2021

Read this now. Right now. Don’t even think of going near that door. Not until you know what’s going on. Your name is Robert Penfold. Age 31. The apartment you’re standing in is your home.

Every 179 days Robbie forgets everything. He knows this because last time it happened he wrote himself a letter explaining it. The disorientation. The fear. The bizarre circumstances imposed by the rare neurological condition he lives with.

To survive the forgetting—to cope with his recurring loss of identity—Robbie leads a solitary, regimented life. Lives alone. Speaks to no one if he can avoid it. Works to complete a strange herculean task set for him by his former self.

And then, with twelve days left before his next forgetting, Julie invades his life. Young, beautiful—the only woman he can ever remember meeting.

As the hour draws near, Robbie is forced to confront the fact that his past is very different from how he had imagined it. And when Julie reveals her own terrible secret, he must find a way to come to terms with the truth about himself.

The Beautiful Fall is a cinematic, page-turning romance. Both an intriguing puzzle and a compulsively readable love story, it will sweep you away.

    

 ARC received from Text Publishing for an honest review 

 I was very intrigued by the premise of The Beautiful Fall, and Robbie's life was something I wanted to know more about.

And whilst I liked the story, I did find that it was at times slow and dragged a bit in the middle.

Robbie, who I could understand why he was shut off from the world the way he was, just came across as a bit too robotic for me. I wanted him to feel more emotion than came across.  

And domino obsession - yeah, I had a lot of trouble getting what that was all about.

I did like that as things were learned about Julie and more of his past, Robbie did come to life a bit, but for me it was a case of too little, too late.

It was like watching Groundhog Day and Fifty First Dates, but without the emotion these movies capture. It was too dry and clinical to really draw this reader in. The philosophy background of the author really comes through in the story.

But this is just my opinion, and others might really love all this.