-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:What determines your identity? Is it the clothes you wear? The way other people treat you? When private investigator Nick Petrov wakes up in a hospital room everyone treats him like a victim but he can't remember how he got there in the first place. Digging for answers when he doesn't even know the questions, he begins to fear he is searching for the most elusive quarry he has ever hunted: himself.
What determines your identity? Is it the clothes you wear?
The way other people treat you? The stories, anecdotes and experiences you
have stored in your memory? When Nick Petrov wakes up in a hospital room,
his clothes are two sizes too big. Everyone treats him like a victim. And he
can't remember how he got there in the first place.
Nick Petrov is a
brilliant private investigator with a reputation for bringing missing
children safely home. Launched to tabloid stardom when he apprehended a
brutal serial killer named Gerald Reasoner, Petrov has become something of a
celebrity. When a woman approaches him, begging him to use his unique gifts
to find her missing daughter, Petrov's instincts sound an alarm. He senses
that she's concealing something. But is she lying to get Petrov's help or to
set him up? Three days later, just as he has amassed all the answers he
needs to close the case, they are swept away into oblivion.
Petrov awakes in a hospital bed, his memory of the past two weeks a
complete blank, his personality altered. He is tempted to just put the
trauma behind him and move on with his life, but there are too many things
holding him back. When he returns home, he discovers a photograph full of
strangers. In his office is a greeting card with a cryptic message inside,
both the receiver and the sender completely unknown. His bank account has
been augmented by a $450 check from a woman he can't remember. All of it
points to a case he cannot recall.
Digging for answers when he doesn't even know the questions, Petrov
begins to fear he is searching for the most elusive quarry he has ever
hunted: himself. Uncomfortable truths about his past rise up from this
haunting investigation, truths that force him to reinterpret the events of
the notorious Reasoner case from years before. But the closer Petrov comes
to solving the mystery, the more likely it seems that the monster he's
looking for is staring back at him in the mirror.
As Joyce Carol Oates so eloquently puts it, "Oblivion immerses us in Petrov's assailed consciousness as he navigates his way through a Dali landscape of baffling clues, memory lapses, and visual hallucinations.."..continued
Full Review
(77 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Abraham's first book, The Fury of Rachel Monette, was published in 1980;
since then he has published a further 15 adult novels and, last year, his first
novel for teens,
Down The Rabbit Hole, the first in the Echo Falls Mystery series.
Although all his books fall broadly into the thriller category, to pigeonhole
him as simply a writer of thrillers is too simplistic. For a bibliography of his books see
BookBrowse. His latest novel for adults, End of Story, was
published in hardcover earlier this month, and the second in his Echo Falls
Mystery, Behind The Curtain, series will be published next week.
When asked which authors have most influences him he cites Vladimir Nabokov,
Graham Greene and Dostoevsky...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Oblivion, try these:
by Abby Geni
Published 2017
A debut novel from a talented and provocative new writer which upends the traditional structure of a mystery novel while also exploring wider themes of the natural world, the power of loss, and the nature of recovery.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
by Anthony Marra
Published 2014
A brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital where a tough-minded doctor decides to harbor a hunted young girl, with powerful consequences.
.gif)
They say that in the end truth will triumph, but it's a lie.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Joyce Carol Oates
Neurological impairment is something we're all too likely to know firsthand, and Peter Abrahams's suspense novel Oblivion makes of this condition something rich and strange: an investigation into "lost time, like some dark forest in a fairy tale."
