The Amnesia Clinic - Tapa blanda

"The Amnesia Clinic" is an extraordinary, powerful novel set in Quito, Ecuador. Anti, a quiet English boy, strikes up a friendship with flamboyant local classmate Fabian. Fabian is everything Anti isn't: handsome, athletic and popular. What's more, he lives with his cool, eccentric Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents. Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales, and before long, the relationship between them becomes one conducted entirely through the medium of storytelling. One subject is taboo: Fabian's parents. But when details surrounding their disappearance begin to emerge, Anti decides to console his friend with a story suggesting that Fabian's mother may be living at a bizarre hospital on the coast for patients with memory loss. With confused emotions and reality losing its tenuous grip, the boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an 'Amnesia Clinic' that may, or may not exist...

James Scudamore was born 1976 and spent much of his childhood living abroad. After leaving school he speant a year working and travelling in Ecuador before returning to England to study modern languages at Oxford. As a graduate, he worked in advertising, notching up such notable achievements as inventing the Bart Simpson's Eat My Shorts cereal for Kellogg's. But after four years he gave it all up to take a creative writing course at UEA... and then he wrote The Amnesia Clinic. Now, he is now more author than advertising exec. (though he does moonlight as a jazz pianist from time to time).