Everything I Don't Remember

About this book

A young man named Samuel dies in a horrible car crash. Was it an accident or was it suicide? An unnamed writer with an agenda of his own sets out to map Samuel’s last day alive. Through conversations with friends, relatives, and neighbors, a portrait of Samuel emerges: the loving grandchild, the reluctant bureaucrat, the loyal friend, the contrived poseur. The young man who did everything for his girlfriend Laide and shared everything with his best friend Vandad. Until he lost touch with them both. By piecing together an exhilarating narrative puzzle, we follow Samuel from the day he first encounters the towering Vandad to when they become roommates. We meet Panther, Samuel’s self-involved childhood friend whose move to Berlin cues the beginning of Samuel’s search for the meaning of love – which in turn leads him to Laide. Laide has left a broken marriage behind in Brussels and returned to Stockholm where she becomes the protector of vulnerable women she meets in her role as interpreter from Arabic. When Samuel’s grandmother moves to a retirement home, Samuel and Laide secretly turn her house into a safe house for women. Samuel spends less and less time with Vandad as he becomes more drawn into his relationship with Laide, and Vandad, who is struggling to find work, is broke and misses his best friend. When an opportunity arises to become more involved in Samuel’s life and make a buck at the same time, he jumps at the chance. But after disaster strikes, the question of who did what drives a wedge between the friends. Everything I Don’t Remember (Allt jag inte minns) is a gripping tale about love and memory. But it is also a story about a writer who, by filling out the contours of Samuel’s story, is actually trying to grasp a truth about himself. In the end, what remains of all our fleeting memories? And what is hidden behind everything we don’t remember? By employing the detective novel’s narrative suspense and shifting perspectives, Jonas Hassen Khemiri has created a story that grips us by the throat and won’t let us go while simultaneously challenging us to see ourselves and the world in new ways. Told with Khemiri’s characteristic stylistic ingenuity, Everything I Don’t Remember is an emotional roller coaster ride of a book that promises to become a modern classic.

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