Nostalgia's Boat

Stunning—an intricate and intriguing web of relationships! An ever-morphing story, tightening its grip as it expands, this novel melds the psychological and philosophical. Nostalgia’s Boat is a potent reminder of Randi Reissenweber’s perspective that “When you read fiction, you are, first and foremost, meeting people.”

Soramimi Hanarejima

Nostalgia is a bringing or binding together; a conjunction of either happy memories or of a large mosaic memory, shared by many, of something that happened in the so-called good old days.

- It is not about me and what I remember.

- It is not about you and what you remember.

Nostalgia is a clue that it’s time to challenge what we think we remember. The most startling thing about my teenage years was the incident in which I took Lucas to his Uncle Raymond’s room in the asylum. Things happened on that day that do not compute. They are false. And it’s not for me to tell you what to think. It’s for me to tell you to think.Find Mr Latham. Find Lucas.

“The passengers on Nostalgia’s Boat are caught up in a net that is cast far and wide: it draws on the past, present and fantasies for the future, allowing the characters to transcend space and time. What is seen above the waters is as important as what lurks below. Mathew is happy to leave us guessing about right and wrong/good and bad in a paradoxical world where the fellowship and ethics of ‘life on the street’ are contrasted with the drive to carry out ‘good’ academic research. Surely, mothers, lovers, au pairs and biscuit manufacturers don’t really behave like this ... or do they? Nostalgia’s Boat is the first David Mathew novel I have read, and it will not be my last.”