Product Description

In the deserted rooms above Hewitt's Shoe Repairs and Fittings, seventy-two-year-old Winifred Foy has sought refuge. Abandoned time and again throughout her life, Winnie lives in a delicate world of exile and isolation, until she is robbed of her only material possessions: a suitcase and a wig. On a journey to find the thief, Winnie enters her unbound world and pieces together the fragments of her life, from her childhood in the 1930s, to the dislocation caused by the Second World War, to the memory of her first love. Winnie's once secluded world beings to fill with people, and with ghosts, including her devoted but quixotic father, the haunting figure of her mother, her domineering grandfather and her spinster aunt. Time and memory are eerily fluid, and Winnie is forced to confront the layered shadows of her former self.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1096523 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this odd and moving second novel from Azzopardi, whose first novel, The Hiding, was a Booker finalist, a thief makes off with a small case containing some useless relics belonging to an elderly homeless woman—variously called Patricia, Lillian and Winifred, depending on the people who "care" for her. Patricia's search for the thief and her belongings becomes an excavation of her past, beginning with her prewar girlhood in the English town of Chapelfield; it's a haunting evocation of neglect, abuse and mental illness. Born with a head of spiky red locks that her dad refers to as "telltale" hair, the "feeble-minded" Patricia is passed off to her grandfather (after her depressed, delusional mother dies), then, during WWII, sent to live with a bitter, lonely aunt on a scraggly farm. But when 15-year-old Patricia gets pregnant, she's shuttled back to Chapelfield, only to discover that all her relatives have disappeared. It's a harrowing, painful story, saved from melodrama by the unsentimental first-person perspective and a challenging, elliptical narrative. The backstory, revolving around the telltale hair, is slow to emerge, but as the pieces of the plot begin to fall into place, the book gains sweep and power, building to an unexpected (and unexpectedly horrifying) climax. The prose has flashes of brilliance—"the rain is a river of silver coins"—and while some readers won't respond to the fatalistic acquiescence of Patricia/Lillian/Winnie, they can't fail to be moved by the sadness that shrouds this largely lost life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Corrie James reads this tale of remembrance and abandonment with an odd mix of cynicism and wonder, an appropriate blend to set the tone as main character Winnie looks back on her difficult life. As homeless Winnie attempts to track down the fate of her few stolen belongings, she recounts how each item came into her possession. James alters her voice subtly, giving the young Winnie an optimistic wistfulness, while making the older Winnie sound as wizened and bitter as she has become. The inflections are so subtle, however, and the flashbacks so frequent, that it's easy confuse timing in the book. The novel itself gets off to a slow start, also matched by James's reading, but as the story line picks up, so does James's performance, making the surprise ending worth waiting for. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Azzopardi's canny sense of the link between trauma and mental instability shaped her first novel, The Hiding Place (2000). In her second, she hones both her craft and her insights to create a darkly mystical tale of loss, betrayal, and disconnection. Her narrator, Winnie, a homeless woman in her seventies, is a compelling yet enigmatic narrator whose memories of her painful past are abruptly reawakened when she is robbed of her precious few possessions. The reader is carried back to her lonely childhood, when she was known as Patsy, then Lillian, and farmed out to unloving relatives in the English countryside after her mother commits suicide and the Nazis begin their bombing blitz. Considered simpleminded, she suffers every sort of deprivation and is at everyone's mercy, including a lustful shoemaker and a Svengali-like couple who transform her into a crowd-thrilling clairvoyant. Azzopardi's prose is spellbinding. Her rendering of a soul unmoored is keenly poignant. The mysterious and involving situations she conjures are fairy-tale-like in their haunting harshness and deep resonance, and her subtle questioning of our notions of identity, family, and the claims of the dead make for a profoundly contemplative read. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

I Remember You
Homeless and squatting in a house in England, Patricia is shocked when a girl enters her house and takes the only possessions that she has: a suitcase containing a wig and various other bits of nick knacks and mementos that one collects through out life. To Patricia, they are her possessions, her belongings and items with which she has marked her life.

Being forced to get her belongings back also forces Patricia to look back on her life up until her suitcase was stolen. How, for instance, did she end up as a street walker when she had her whole life ahead of her? We are taken along on Patricia's trip as she moves back and forth between the past and present, so that we see both sides of her. What she was and what she is now.

Born in the 1930's, Patricia's mother is taken by "ghosts." Mentally unwell, her father sells all the family heirlooms to help pay for her mother's medication. When her mother dies, Patricia is sent to live with her grandfather. Soon after, her father stops visiting.

Life with her grandfather goes well enough until Patricia is sent to her aunts, where things are supposedly better and the depression has not reached as far. When Patricia becomes pregnant, she is sent back to her grandfathers in disgrace, only to find the house he use to live in empty. Alone in the world and not a soul to call her own, she flees into the forest and lives there until she is found by a fortune teller who tells her that she is his salvation, that she has the gift.

Soon, Patricia is caught in a downward spiral, both in the past and in the present. Patricia knows that if she is to solve the mystery of the present, missing suitcase and all, she must also solve the mysteries of her past. For it is in the past that the answers for the future are to be found.

This is an incredible novel. From start to finish it is told with beautiful language and even more beautiful imagery that makes Patricia's wartime world come to life. Azzopardi is a magician with words, evoking pictures, visions, emotions and feelings from the depths of compassion. "Remember Me" is so beautifully written, I was in awe while I was reading.

Patricia is also a likable character. As you get to know her, Patricia becomes more than a homeless woman, more than a squatter in an abandoned England home. The characters are alive in this book and they will haunt you afterwards. Patricia may be the unluckiest person in fiction that I have ever read about; but even though this book may be a little bit depressing, it's more than worth the read.

What I admired most about this novel as the story of Patricia and Azzopardi's ability to convey human suffering and make it so horrible yet so beautiful at the same time. She reaches into the consciousness of her heroine and makes her more than a two dimensional character. After reading "Remember Me" I thought of all the homeless people I pass every day and wondered if their lives hold the same tragedy.

This is a heartbreaking novel, but an amazing one. It really serves to drive home the idea that all is not what it seems. That, unless we are willing to go beneath the surface, we will never really know the whole story behind someone's life. Written with ease and beauty, "Remember Me" is an incredible achievement. I will be haunted by it for some time.

Futile effort
OK... I tried... and kept trying. I could not finish this book. (a rarity for me.) As much as Patricia was suffering... so was I --- with the writing. It was like trudging thru a bog.

Tender and gentle, the story of a innocent
Welsh-born Trezza Azzopardi has followed up her remarkable debut novel ("Hiding Place") with one that shows maturity and skill in addition to a gentle empathy with her characters. The narrative is related by an old woman who is what was once called "simple-minded." Passed around as a child amongst adults who alternately love, use, tolerate and scorn her, she struggles to make sense of events in terms she can understand. Painfully aware of her "differentness", she learns to ride the hard times patiently and fight back only when pushed beyond endurance.

Azzopardi has cleverly allowed the thoughts of her protagonist, as expressed in the story, to be articulate and perceptive, although the character struggles to express herself out loud to others. The result is a sustained level of tension with poetic imagery that never becomes overwrought or maudlin.

By the end of "Remember Me", Winnie has made her peace with the world, and neither wants nor needs our sympathy. Nevertheless, we should be ashamed that she was based on a real life "resident of the streets", one of those forced to squat in abandoned buildings in the middle of so much affluence.