The Book of M

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The Book of M
Peng Shepherd

A vivid, touching and original debut, following the effects of an extraordinary catastrophe on very ordinary people.In the middle of a market in India, a man’s shadow disappears. As rolling twenty-four-hour news coverage tries to explain the event, more cases are discovered. The phenomenon spreads like a plague as people learn the true cost of their lost part: their memories.Two years later, Ory and his wife Max have escaped ‘the Forgetting’ by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods in Virgina. They have settled into their new reality, until Max, too, loses her shadow.Knowing the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to the person most precious to her, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up what little time they have left before she loses her memory completely, and desperately follows her trail.On their separate journeys, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a mysterious new force growing in the south that may hold the cure. But neither could have guessed at what you gain when you lose your shadow: the power of magic.A breathtakingly imaginative, timeless story that explores fundamental questions about memory and love—the price of forgetting, the power of connection, and what it means to be human when your world is turned upside down.

Copyright (#uefc62768-569a-5f16-8ca9-d882d09bc817)

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Peng Shepherd 2018

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

Peng Shepherd asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008225605

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008225629

Version: 2018-05-16

Contents

Cover (#u68e71212-ddf1-51a1-8b51-b8dfff09e5ae)

Title Page (#u394ee4fe-ebc2-5851-bbcd-b1ff9aabdeb3)

Copyright

Part I

Orlando Zhang

Orlando Zhang

Orlando Zhang

Orlando Zhang

Part II

Mahnaz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

Mahnaz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

Mahnaz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

Mahnaz Ahmadi

The One Who Gathers

The One Who Gathers

Orlando Zhang

Naz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

The One Who Gathers

Orlando Zhang

Mahnaz Ahmadi

The One Who Gathers

Orlando Zhang

Part III

Orlando Zhang

Orlando Zhang

Orlando Zhang

The One Who Gathers

Mahnaz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

Mahnaz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

The One Who Gathers

Orlando Zhang

The One Who Gathers

Mahnaz Ahmadi

The One Who Gathers

Orlando Zhang

Mahnaz Ahmadi

The One Who Gathers

Orlando Zhang

Part IV

Orlando Zhang

Mahnaz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

The One Who Gathers

Orlando Zhang

Mahnaz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

The One Who Gathers

Mahnaz Ahmadi

The One Who Gathers

Mahnaz Ahmadi

Orlando Zhang

Part V

M

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

ORLANDO ZHANG (#uefc62768-569a-5f16-8ca9-d882d09bc817)

THE END OF ORY’S WORLD BEGAN WITH A DEER.

He went outside at dawn to where the trees began, to check the game trap. Followed the trip wire, pushed away the leaves, uncovered the hidden metal cage. Empty.

The air had already turned his hands red with cold before he’d scattered the dried twigs back into place with the nose of his shotgun. The last time there had been anything snared inside had been two weeks ago, at least. Pale orange bruised into gray around the edges of the horizon, a gangrenous dawn. He and his wife, Max, were down to just one meal now that it was too cold to catch anything—a jar of spaghetti sauce he’d found the last time he broke into an abandoned house in western Arlington. There was no delaying it any longer. Ory would have to go into the city again to scavenge for food. Go or starve.

On the way back in, he saw it, frozen midstep in the weeds a few feet from the tree line. A deer. Its huge, dark pupils gleamed as they stared warily back, calculating. It should have dropped its antlers for the coming winter already, but they were still there, perched between its pricked ears. We’re saved, Ory thought. He raised the double-barrel Remington in silence and aimed. Then he saw.

White steam billowed around its muzzle. The obsidian eyes blinked. It had seemed like a deer, but now he could see that it was not. Almost, but not quite. Where its bony, branchlike antlers should have been, instead a pair of small brown wings sprouted from its forehead, mottled feathers spread in the same way horns might curve.

Max.

Ory made for the shelter at a sprint. Inside, he scrambled to lock all the locks and re-prop the wood plank at an angle under the doorknob as fast as he could. Max was still asleep when he had left her, snoring lightly on her stomach, hair in her face. Ory went straight to the bedroom, straight to her.

“Blue,” he said as soon as her drowsy, dream-heavy eyes fluttered open and met his own. He waited, breathless, for her to speak. It was their test, their way of telling whether or not she still knew who he was.

“Fifty-two,” she whispered back.

They met at a football game.