Forgetting Zoe - Tapa blanda

"I read Forgetting Zoë with great pleasure, admiration, and envy. What a writer. The characters are so sharply drawn they're etched into the page. It's admirable the way that Ray describes with equal intensity two such different landscapes. He's using language like thick oil paint; you read and are inside the world being described. Captivating. A great storytelling achievement." (Tim Pears)

"A convincing portrait of how childhood brutality is passed down the generations...Direct in its depiction of abuse, Forgetting Zoë is never less than psychologically acute." (Financial Times)

"Stockholm syndrome is a curious but understandable condition, intelligently and vividly explored by Ray Robinson...It is a measure of Ray Robinson's own sympathetic imagination that he makes Thurman credible as a human being and not merely a monster...He shows with great skill how Zoë becomes emotionally dependent on him...The action moves between Arizona and the Canadian island, and the atmosphere of both places is very well conveyed...Ray Robinson is a writer with keen observation. His prose is hard, abrupt and sinewy. He abstains from judgment, content to present his characters in action, though also ready to enter into their minds. The novel is a study of obsession, but also of the inadequacy of obsession...It's a novel that starts as an ugly and nasty story but ends up by being moving and even tender. This is partly because Robinson shows us goodness co-existing with evil and outfacing it...It is a novel that contains violence but also stillness, that reveals more than it makes explicit...A mature and accomplished work." (Allan Massie The Scotsman)

"Well executed." (The Times)

"Very provocative...Powerfully done." (Tom Sutcliffe Saturday Review, Radio 4)

Zoë Nielsen was just like any other ten-year-old walking to school, not knowing that a chance encounter with Thurman Hayes would lead to her abduction and imprisonment in a converted nuclear bunker beneath a remote Arizona ranch house.

Back home, 4,000 miles away on an island off the coast of Newfoundland, the press coverage surrounding Zoe's mother, Ingrid, is rapidly turning sour. Even the arrest of a suspect and Ingrid's newly established relationship with Zoë's father isn't enough to stop the nightmare from which there is no waking

Enslaved in her underground tomb, deprived of food and light and water, the girl Zoe once was steadily begins to disappear. Allowed to see and hear only what Thurman permits, she lives in a world that is all about his needs and wants being met...

But over time Thurman will grow tired of the rapidly maturing Zoë. And when he decides it is time to get rid of her, Zoë must finally make her bid for freedom.

Forgetting Zoë is a moving, epic tale of courage, survival, horror and loss, that explores how a bond of affection and intimacy can develop between captive and captor.