SOURCE: "Gritty Terrain," in Books in Canada, Vol. XXI, No. 6, September, 1992, pp. 48-9.

[Hill is a Canadian nonfiction writer, fiction writer, poet, and critic. In the following excerpt, he presents a positive assessment of Amnesia.]

Douglas Cooper's Amnesia is a dark and troubling story … with an … important thematic centre. A series of narrative meditations on memory and forgetting, the novel finds its energy source in domestic disintegration; around the tale's specific events lurks the enormous memory-shadow of the Holocaust, modern history's most infamous example of family destruction. We forget what we can no longer bear to remember, Cooper suggests, personally and collectively. Either way is trauma; either way we suffer.

An excerpt from Amnesia

Katie sat despondently at the window that was his door and stared at the sky. The relentless cloud showed no sign of diminishing. Across the city she could hear a siren, the sound strangely...