James Mather is a psychiatrist in his sixties. He is invited to take on a new group of patients. All he knows about them is that each one claims to have been abducted by aliens.
His wife, Deborah, is sceptical, but he gets going anyway. His patients tell mesmerising stories. There’s Anthony, for instance, who was camping one night by the Aral Sea; or Mary, the owner of a beauty salon, confronted by a ball of light moving towards her in her bedroom.
James’s research assistant Lucy Cheng sits in on each session. She’s an attractive young divorcee, who has made a study of anxiety, and who takes notes about each conversation.
Capture is a strange philosophical fable about what we can believe in a post-truth world. It will beguile and baffle its readers. Amanda Lohrey is an extraordinary writer. Her novel might be full of crazy stuff, but who could deny its sanity?
andCapture
‘A deft and poetic writer.’
‘Lohrey’s body of fiction always has philosophical foundations for its warmly human stories.’
‘Lohrey is a beautiful writer.’
‘[Lohrey’s] storytelling is masterful: honed to pleasing plainness and assured in its measured tempo, her novels would take multiple readings to unpick her craft, which is deft to the point of invisibility at times.’
‘A taut yet contemplative story whose apparent simplicity belies its scope.’
‘A serious – and seriously wonderful – novel about alien abductees…Elusive, unsettled, defiant.’
‘Capture fascinated me to the very end…a very satisfactory piece of writing.’
‘Strange and delightful…Reading it certainly ensures reflection on life.’
‘Thought-provoking. Book groups which are comfortable with ambiguity will love this book. I know I did.’
‘Expertly reinvestigates the quest for meaning.’
‘Marked by cool intellectual rigour, embedded in literary forms that are designed to probe the ineffable.’
‘Superb…a gripping fable that animates urgent questions about how we make meaning of our own experiences and those of others.’
