Remember Me Like This

“Certainly a page-turning read but more than that it's a subtle analysis of what the minutiae of ordinary life might be like when people find themselves in an extraordinary situation for which there's no rule book.”

DAILY MAIL

“A powerful, complex and affecting debut.”

SHORTLIST

“The writing is clear and beautiful”

OBSERVER – Best Summer Reads 2014

“Enthralling and skillful... the book's beauty is in its complexity, in its characters' endless search for the truth... uncomfortably revealing... What Johnston captures and examines so expertly isn't the kind of sadistic cruelty familiar to anyone with a television, but a subtler, more quietly menacing variety, the eggshell tiptoeing, the killing kindness we unknowingly inflict when acting out of love and fear... Remember Me Like This isn't a novel about kidnapping. It's not a psychological study of Stockholm syndrome or a victimology. It's not a thriller, and it's not even really a mystery, unless it's an unsolved one, the exquisitely moral mystery of how we struggle to accept and love the people we call family, even when we can't fully know them”

NEW YORK TIMES

“This portrayal of a family struggling through what should be its happiest moment is tremendously moving... there's real humanity in Johnston's writing, and it's heartening to spend time with these folks as they relearn how to be a family. Rendered in these compassionate, candid chapters, theirs is a struggle that speaks to those of us who have endured far less”

WASHINGTON POST

“[an] extraordinary first novel... In his debut, [Johnston] offers an achingly beautiful and psychologically insightful portrait of a family rebuilding after a traumatic event. The book is alive with the fully imagined inner lives of each of its characters. Johnston's scenes are exquisite, the internal and external worlds kept in taut balance... Johnston is a terrific stylist who wields lyrical language in a way that makes it seem natural and unforced... in this fully immersive novel in which the language is luminous and the delivery almost flawless… Readers will be surprised and moved by this novel in which being found is only the beginning of the story.”

BOSTON GLOBE

“Like all great novels, the characters rather than the plot keep the reader riveted, although the plot alone would be gripping enough... We get to know the emotion coiled up inside each of [the characters] intimately - so intense is the interiority at times that it makes for a sort of southern Texan version of reading Virginia Woolf... Remember Me Like This is a novel of emotional dexterity and purity: It reminds us that lost things can be found, but that they will be so on their own terms. And it is also a novel you finish having felt, like it or not, as the characters did - deeply.”

HUFFINGTON POST

“Enthralling... I know the novel you're looking for. It's the thriller that also has interesting sentences. It's the one with a driving plot but fully realized characters as well, the one that flows like it was plotted by Dennis Lehane but feels like it was written by Jonathan Franzen. Johnston has a gift for creating characters that are perfectly ordinary but also deeply peculiar... In the end, the high literary technique and the pulp elements of Remember Me Like This contribute so seamlessly to each other you wonder how they got separate in the first place. It doesn't need a name. It's just good to read.”

ESQUIRE

“There is a compelling mystery at the heart of the novel, but it’s a mystery that Mr. Johnston solves almost by osmosis, never directly revealing exactly what happened to Justin Campell yet somehow satisfying a reader’s deeper curiosity about how such a shattered family could ever pull itself back together.”

STEPHEN HARRIGAN, WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Remember Me Like This is breathtaking. Deeply empathetic and masterfully constructed, it's a raw, courageous portrait of a family attempting to rebuild themselves. It's a novel that has both the feel of a great epic and the focused intensity of standing on a highwire. I read in awe.”

PAUL YOON, SALON

“The genius of this novel is its subtlety, with the characters displaying the true-to-life emotions of guilt and confusion in the aftershock of tragedy.”

IRISH TATLER

“Beautiful and engrossing book... a most moving novel and the least sensational take on a socially incendiary issue... What is so thrilling and moving about this novel is that the detail is so meticulous, the emotional lives are so brilliantly captured that every character stands out; there is heart and depth on every page... The physical detail, the narrative detail and the emotional detail are all one and the same in Johnston's fine writing... The emotional intelligence of the novel cuts deep, and reading it is a moving and ultimately uplifting experience.”

IRISH EXAMINER

“Superbly crafted... Told from a multiplicity of view points which quietly merge into a surprisingly gripping and suspenseful narrative... memorable.”

SUNDAY BUSINESS POST (IRELAND)

“Bret Anthony Johnston presents a thrilling debut novel with Remember Me Like This . . . This is a sensitively written piece about a family's trauma, which is also filled with suspense.”

IMAGE MAGAZINE

“Remember Me Like This, set in Corpus Christi in south Texas, is a mystery, a page-turning thriller, a poignant novel about loss, a moving family story and a fresh, fascinating look at American history. By beginning the story of a kidnapped boy with his return to his family, Johnston reveals the complexity of our losses and our recoveries, the way a change for one is a change for all, the limits of our love for our children, and the way that love can be expanded beyond those limits... I was astonished and thrilled by this book... [it] has the delicate and precise mechanics of a Swiss watch.”

SUSAN CHEEVER, DAILY BEAST

"In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all too comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost."

ALICE SEBOLD