Returning home can uncover the past you never left behind. Foreign correspondent Marcus Aurelius Hardy comes back to Niagara Falls when his aging mother, Elen, wanders barefoot in a snowstorm. As an Armenian American, Elen is haunted by the ghosts of the Genocide that tore her family apart, and Marcus carries a secret that, if revealed, could shatter the bond between them. At home, he reconnects with his estranged father, a would-be rock star whose absence left deep scars, and with Arch Printup, his childhood friend, still haunted by a cousin' s mysterious death over the Falls. In a town shaped by memory, grief, and loss, every decision echoes with the past, and every relationship carries the weight of history.
"In Memory Falls Mark Jacobs proves yet again that he was born to tell stories about the stag-gered beauties we are, the ways we stay hunted and haunted by heredity, and what we owe one another beneath a heaven that will not hear. He knows these people and places with a startling intimacy, and you will come to know them too, and in the process call this novel what it undeni-ably is: an example of what a literary writer can accomplish when he has mastered his art."
William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark
"As I sped through Memory Falls's raw-boned yet refined story of love and friendship and family and racial history, I kept thinking about how so many languages have two words for the verb to know, one referring to the knowledge of facts and the other to the knowledge of feelings-a distinc-tion that English, much to its speakers' detriment, fails to make. Consider this novel Mark Ja-cobs's attempt to make up for that deficit. "There are circumstances," one of his characters says, "when forgiving one person is the betrayal of another." Here lies the conflict at the core of so much of Jacobs's work, namely, the moral tension between articulated reason, which is what makes us civilized beings, and the untranslatable language of the blood, which is what makes us human. Memory Falls may be Jacobs's clearest and most empathic depiction yet of that struggle in his vast and woefully under-appreciated oeuvre."
Dale Peck, author of Night Soil and What Burns
"Marcus Aurelius Hardy, the main character in Mark Jacobs' great new novel, Memory Falls, takes us with him on a wonderful ride, made so by Mr. Jacobs' always fine writing. Whether we are in the throes of learning about the early 20th-century Armenian genocide, through the memory and research of Marcus's unforgiving mother; learning of the hard-scrabble Native American life up and around Niagara Falls, through Marcus's childhood best friend, Arch; traips-ing through the dusty halls of old rock and roll with his guitar-master dad; or hoping against hope for a rekindling of the one great love of Marcus's life, we are always held firmly in the hands of a master. What I like most about this novel is that it is always a story and never not a story, yet I come away having been taught so very much. Memory Falls will go on my 'Favorite Books' shelf, where it belongs. I know you will like it as much as I do."
Richard Wiley, author of The Grievers' Group and Tacoma Stories
