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Forgetting Is How We Survive
Shortlisted for the 2024 Edge Hill Prize, the stories in this collection come from another England where earthy realism hides a world where anything is possible.
A plane crashes. A boy drowns. A body is found on a dark lakeside. A woman tries to make sense of a strange memory from her childhood. A father searches for a missing dog - his only link to his lost son. A boy on the brink of adolescence embarks on a journey and gets more than he bargained for. Young lovers get their kicks trespassing in empty houses. A young man prepares to leave his hometown for the last time, and a giant sink hole threatens to swallow everything.
In Forgetting Is How We Survive, people are haunted by ghosts of the past, tormented by doppelgangers and pining for the futures that have been lost to them. Each faces a turning point - an event that will move their life from one path to another, and every event casts a shadow.
'An unforgettable collection. Frankel is a fearless explorer of the perilous edges of life, where loss, shame and desire haunt and beguile. As readers, we trespass in derelict landscapes, abandoned homes and secret lives. We navigate by glimpse and echo, travelling switchbacks of time and teetering at brinks as big as sinkholes. Here, possibilities glimmer, mystery is sometimes breached, and, just occasionally, beauty flashes like a survival flare.'
Alison MacLeod, TENDERNESS
‘In David Frankel's remarkable stories the everyday is at once strange and threatening, the setting for both beautiful and terrible events. Frankel maps the edgelands, the fringes, the marginalised. His theme is the ways in which we are haunted and shaped by memories and experiences that are inherently unreliable. This is a brilliantly unsettling debut.’
Ben Tufnell, THE NORTH SHORE
A plane crashes. A boy drowns. A body is found on a dark lakeside. A woman tries to make sense of a strange memory from her childhood. A father searches for a missing dog - his only link to his lost son. A boy on the brink of adolescence embarks on a journey and gets more than he bargained for. Young lovers get their kicks trespassing in empty houses. A young man prepares to leave his hometown for the last time, and a giant sink hole threatens to swallow everything.
In Forgetting Is How We Survive, people are haunted by ghosts of the past, tormented by doppelgangers and pining for the futures that have been lost to them. Each faces a turning point - an event that will move their life from one path to another, and every event casts a shadow.
'An unforgettable collection. Frankel is a fearless explorer of the perilous edges of life, where loss, shame and desire haunt and beguile. As readers, we trespass in derelict landscapes, abandoned homes and secret lives. We navigate by glimpse and echo, travelling switchbacks of time and teetering at brinks as big as sinkholes. Here, possibilities glimmer, mystery is sometimes breached, and, just occasionally, beauty flashes like a survival flare.'
Alison MacLeod, TENDERNESS
‘In David Frankel's remarkable stories the everyday is at once strange and threatening, the setting for both beautiful and terrible events. Frankel maps the edgelands, the fringes, the marginalised. His theme is the ways in which we are haunted and shaped by memories and experiences that are inherently unreliable. This is a brilliantly unsettling debut.’
Ben Tufnell, THE NORTH SHORE
149 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 2023
About the author
David Frankel
6 booksDavid Frankel is a writer and artist. He was born in Salford and spent his youth lurking around the westerly fringes of Manchester. For a long time he worked as an artist, but writing was always there in the background, and eventually took over. Since then his stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, and have won prizes or been shortlisted in numerous competitions. His first collection, 'Forgetting Is How We Survive', was shortlisted for the 2024 Edge Hill Prize.
'An unforgettable collection. Frankel is a fearless explorer of the perilous edges of life, where loss, shame and desire haunt and beguile. As readers, we trespass in derelict landscapes, abandoned homes and secret lives. We navigate by glimpse and echo, travelling switchbacks of time and teetering at brinks as big as sinkholes. Here, possibilities glimmer, mystery is sometimes breached, and, just occasionally, beauty flashes like a survival flare.'
Alison MacLeod, TENDERNESS
‘In David Frankel's remarkable stories the everyday is at once strange and threatening, the setting for both beautiful and terrible events. Frankel maps the edgelands, the fringes, the marginalised. His theme is the ways in which we are haunted and shaped by memories and experiences that are inherently unreliable. This is a brilliantly unsettling debut.’
Ben Tufnell, THE NORTH SHORE
'David Frankel’s sharp, alluring fragments read like reports from a disturbing world that, with gradual alarm, we realize is the same one we’re standing in. In these eerie commentaries, we feel flashes of Borges’ Labyrinths and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, though neither can fully prepare us for what we are about to experience. Dark-ravaged, ecclesiastical, rain-lashed, these are stories from a reality that before we glimpsed only in the corner of our eye, but now grows bigger, closer, presses in on us, urgently, with fervour.' Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic
'In short pieces full of vivid images, David Frankel goes out into the derelict edgelands of our messed-up society and encounters a strange, forlorn beauty in those places that defy the advertisers and financiers. ‘The tranquillity of negation,’ he calls what he finds there, in that zone of dread and grace, where the overlooked inhabitants find consolation in oblivion. A brief, marvellous, haunting book, reminiscent of Sebald and Sinclair.' David Swann, author of Season of Bright Sorrow
'An unforgettable collection. Frankel is a fearless explorer of the perilous edges of life, where loss, shame and desire haunt and beguile. As readers, we trespass in derelict landscapes, abandoned homes and secret lives. We navigate by glimpse and echo, travelling switchbacks of time and teetering at brinks as big as sinkholes. Here, possibilities glimmer, mystery is sometimes breached, and, just occasionally, beauty flashes like a survival flare.'
Alison MacLeod, TENDERNESS
‘In David Frankel's remarkable stories the everyday is at once strange and threatening, the setting for both beautiful and terrible events. Frankel maps the edgelands, the fringes, the marginalised. His theme is the ways in which we are haunted and shaped by memories and experiences that are inherently unreliable. This is a brilliantly unsettling debut.’
Ben Tufnell, THE NORTH SHORE
'David Frankel’s sharp, alluring fragments read like reports from a disturbing world that, with gradual alarm, we realize is the same one we’re standing in. In these eerie commentaries, we feel flashes of Borges’ Labyrinths and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, though neither can fully prepare us for what we are about to experience. Dark-ravaged, ecclesiastical, rain-lashed, these are stories from a reality that before we glimpsed only in the corner of our eye, but now grows bigger, closer, presses in on us, urgently, with fervour.' Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic
'In short pieces full of vivid images, David Frankel goes out into the derelict edgelands of our messed-up society and encounters a strange, forlorn beauty in those places that defy the advertisers and financiers. ‘The tranquillity of negation,’ he calls what he finds there, in that zone of dread and grace, where the overlooked inhabitants find consolation in oblivion. A brief, marvellous, haunting book, reminiscent of Sebald and Sinclair.' David Swann, author of Season of Bright Sorrow
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 30, 2025
An unforgettable series of stories. As always in a collection, some were good, some were okay, and some were outstanding. Sink Rate and Empty Rooms are two that I'm still thinking about.
Fantastic and very much worth reading.
Fantastic and very much worth reading.
January 7, 2024
Picked up a signed copy in Ramsgate excellent book tore through it in a single sitting, highlights were definitely Memory system, and downstream the water darkens
August 23, 2024
This was such a lovely surprise. Each story was unique and felt as if written by a different author. Sink Rate, Empty Rooms, and The Memory System really moved me.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews