Memory

The address is on the page when he sits down, written in his own careful capitals. He does not remember writing it.

A year on from Fracture, David Whitaker is teaching again. He keeps his notebook, sees a therapist by Xuân Hương Lake who asks questions and waits for the answers, and drinks his coffee at a café called, without apparent irony, Memory.

The wet season has come back to Đà Lạt, and so have the gaps. A walk to campus he cannot account for. His father's watch, stopped at 3:07, which will not stay wound. Entries in the notebook in a hand that is his and a voice that is not.

And there is Thu, a student from 2018 whom he remembers in detail, down to the café where he is sure they used to talk. The café opened in 2019.

A psychologist knows what grief can do to memory, so Whitaker treats it as evidence and writes it all down. Ruth, an American school counsellor with no patience for his evasions, and James, a retired classics master who hides his fondness behind irony, begin to keep an eye on him. Then the Mid-Autumn festival fills the old quarter with lanterns and bodies, and a night he cannot piece together ends on a hospital ward.

Memory is the second novel of The Expat Psychologist, a nine-book series set in the Vietnamese highland city of Đà Lạt.