Dementia Fiction

Tag: Novels

  • “Goodbye, Vitamin” by Rachel Khong

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    by

    Jan Carson
    in

    There are a number of reasons why I really enjoyed the American writer, Rachel Khong’s debut novel. For one thing it’s very funny. It tackles a relatively serious subject with gravity where gravity’s required and also buckets of humour and wit. Sometimes the humour and pathos are mixed together, as in the following exchange between…

  • “We Are Not Ourselves” by Matthew Thomas

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    by

    Jan Carson
    in

    We Are Not Ourselves was one of the very first Dementia narratives I encountered and it remains one of the best examples of writing about Dementia I’ve come across in any novel. It is an epic saga, in the old-fashioned sense; a novel which follows an American couple, Eileen and Ed Leary from childhood, through…

  • “An Absent Mind” by Eric Rill

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    by

    Jan Carson
    in

    An Absent Mind is a slim novel set in contemporary Canada. It explores the impact of a Dementia diagnosis on a close family unit. The novel opens with the patriarch, Saul beginning to acknowledge his own mental confusion. It moves through his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the advent of the illness and subsequent decline, his move to a…