The Strange Case of Jane O.
A Novel
Karen Thompson Walker
Hardcover
February 25, 2025 | ISBN 9781984853943
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Ebook
February 25, 2025 | ISBN 9781984853950
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About the Book
In this spellbinding and provocative novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles, a young mother is struck by sudden and puzzling psychological symptoms that illuminate the mysterious dimensions of the human mind—and of love.
A year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. Three days after her first visit to a psychiatrist, Jane suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.
Are Jane’s strange experiences the result of being overwhelmed by motherhood, or are they manifestations of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago and who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever deeper into the farthest reaches of her mind and cause him to question everything he thinks he knows about so-called reality—including events in his own life.
Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is both a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate and a mesmerizing literary puzzle about the bonds of love—between mother and child, between a man and a woman, and among those we’ve lost but who may still be among us.
A year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. Three days after her first visit to a psychiatrist, Jane suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.
Are Jane’s strange experiences the result of being overwhelmed by motherhood, or are they manifestations of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago and who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever deeper into the farthest reaches of her mind and cause him to question everything he thinks he knows about so-called reality—including events in his own life.
Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is both a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate and a mesmerizing literary puzzle about the bonds of love—between mother and child, between a man and a woman, and among those we’ve lost but who may still be among us.
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