THE VANISHING YEARS

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Synopsis

Celebrated novelist Alfred Wale is ageing beautifully — until his friend Philip Hardin realises he is not ageing at all.

He is going backward.

When Philip encounters Alfred in a London literary club, the change is unmistakable. Alfred should be forty-five. He looks thirty-five. Soon he confesses the impossible: his life has turned around, and he is moving backward through his own years toward childhood. Old wounds reappear on his body. Old emotions return with terrifying force. And at the centre of the mystery is Lydia Merrick, once Lydia Wren, the woman Alfred abandoned in youth and later transformed into art.

As Alfred’s regression accelerates, Philip, painter Elena Markham, and haunted physician Dr Lane race to understand a condition that once destroyed another patient. But Alfred is not being punished. His mind is trying to revise a life built on escape, ambition, and the theft of another person’s pain.

To save him, they must find the beginning of the wound — and the one person who knew him before he started climbing away from it.

THE VANISHING YEARS is a haunting literary novel of memory, guilt, friendship, and forgiveness, where time does not heal all wounds. Sometimes it returns to them.

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