Imagine Me Gone

　　[ 2017 博客來外文年度選書 ]
　　千踩萬踏後的心─如果，你不在

　　功能失調的家是現代小說和影視常見主角，讓我們早已習慣褪去「理想家庭」的概括性預設，甚至當完美全家福合照出現在電影片頭，觀眾就能預期它勢必作為崩壞的序曲─極可能是在瓦解邊緣卻化險為夷的家庭喜劇，更說不定是場危機四伏又鬼影幢幢的恐怖電影。那麼，我們還有什麼可以期待？ 悲傷幽默、苦甜交織─Imagine Me Gone

　　Michael is John and Margaret's eldest son. He's a precocious kid, smart and funny, obsessed with books and music. Even while he's still very young, he finds himself at odds with his father in ways neither one quite understands.

　　His sister Celia is the sensible one in the family: tougher than the boys, unshakeably certain about how the world works, desperate to impress her dad.

　　And then there's Alec, the youngest, the most ambitious and also the most sensitive. He grows up in the shadow of Michael's distant coolness and Celia's pragmatic confidence, never quite understanding his father's strange games or keeping up with the others.

　　The children are still living at home when their brilliant, beloved father walks into the woods by their house and take his own life. Years later, when they are adults, one of them will follow him.

　　How are we damaged by what we are born into - by those we love or who have loved us? How much can any family give to save one of its own? And how can you tell the difference between what is passed on and what is simply imitated or learned by habit - between the truly inherited flaw and the self-fulfilling prophecy?

　　Weaving together the voices of five family members, Adam Haslett imagines how a single isolated tragedy can become the event that defines many lives, unfolding a rich and painful novel that has all the makings of an American classic.

作者簡介

　　Adam Haslett was born in Port Chester, New York in 1970. He is the author of the short-story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, a New York Times bestseller shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the US National Book Award, and the novel Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award. His books have been translated into eighteen languages and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, the Financial Times, and Der Spiegel, among others.