The Amnesiac Sam Taylor Faber & Faber, 329pp, £12.99
This second novel by the former music journalist Sam Taylor is best described as "a detective story about lost time". Nearing the wrong side of 30, James Purdew has reached an impasse in his life, which seems to have no direction or meaning.
Having just broken up with his girlfriend, and incapacitated with his leg in a plaster cast for eight weeks, he becomes obsessed with a three-year period of his life of which he has no memory. The diaries from these years are locked in a virtually bomb-proof safe under his bed, so he travels back to the city of H, where he lived at the time, to unravel the mysteries of his past. Underneath the wallpaper in a familiar house, he finds the first chapter of a 19th-century novel, Confessions of a Killer, which seems to offer clues. Snatches of recollections tease him, drawing him further into the puzzle, which inevitably poses a series of questions about memory, identity and fiction itself.
As you might have guessed, Taylor tends to overuse familiar tropes (as well as not-so-subtle literary allusions), and the ending fails to live up to the promising opening. Nevertheless, his writing is well crafted, and the story is an absorbing one that does ask some worthwhile questions, especially for anyone who is fond of alcohol, or who worries they may be going senile
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