Memory wall. Anthony Doerr. 2012.

Anthony Doerr’s new collection of stories is about memory: the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, and the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others.

In the luminous title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman’s secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In ‘The River Nemunas’, a teenaged orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. And in ‘Afterworld’, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.