A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from a great American writer.

Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, a young man must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and reoffending sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership. But when the Professor's past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men's relationship shifts. Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.

"The opening pages of Lost Memory of Skin are the most electrifying I've read in a while" - Sunday Times

"Banks is one of the United States' bravest, most daring writers" - Irish Times

"We live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain" - New York Times

"Banks is one of those precious writers like Twain or Salinger who creates a voice so wonderfully real that the experience of reading them is like a conversation with an old friend" - Sunday Times

"Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power." - Boston Globe

"A canonical book for our time" - New York Times

"Always, Banks writes with trembling knowledge, conviction, and authenticity." - Chicago Tribune

"Russell Banks knows everything worth knowing...and much, much more." - Washington Post Book World

"Wrenching, panoramic ... suspenseful" - New York Times

"Banks is too nuanced a writer to make his central character simply a study in victimhood, and the Kid isn't one for self-pity, which would smack of weakness. Yet there is more than a touch of "j'accuse" about the book. It points its finger at a society that has mistaken the easy gratification of the virtual world with reality, skin flicks for actual skin ... The novel sings brightest when it gives itself up to his guileless stream of consciousness, and is at its most persuasive and tender as it charts his growing self-awareness" - Financial Times

"Banks is one of the United States' bravest, most daring writers ... As well as being courageous, Banks is moralistic, an old style polemicist unafraid of portraying technology as a serpent in the garden ... The strength opf the book, as of Banks the writer, is an enduring belief in the grey area. Very little about this novel is black and white ... Banks can be angry and is often righteous, and there are elements of both in this novel. But his humanity shines through ... Yet again Russell Banks, as committed a commentator as Don DeLillo, looks to - and at - his country in a novel that is uncompromising on the subject of compromise. This is a tough book, raising uncomfortable issues. Banks is dogged and determined, a visionary realist who believes in testing fiction - and his readers. Here is an unsettling narrative that will leave one queasy and sheepish on the question of right and wrong and good and evil. It also testifies to the validity of story as both entertainment and polemic. There may, perhaps, be better novels, but few are as important or as cautionary" - Irish Times

"A superb prose-stylist" - Independent

"Russell Banks is the master of moral ambiguity" - Australian Financial Review