Great Eastern Land — D.J. Taylor

Past and present collide for a man on a mission to document a history that may or may not exist, in this ingenious novel by the acclaimed author of Derby Day

Dr. Feelgood's is a brothel overrun with fat, overindulged mice that lies at the western tip of a remote village somewhere in the Far East. It's presided over by Mr. Mouzookseem, an illiterate Englishman with his own reasons for fleeing the family fold for a life of anonymity. This is the beginning -- or is it the end? -- of a story that weaves in and out of time as David Castell immortalizes Mouzookseem and others in his notebook.
 
A pragmatist whose father had his own ideas about what history can teach, David is a traveler of the mind and heart. Although he has been to exotic places, from Kashmir to the Russian steppe, he finds the domestic train from Paddington to Oxford hopelessly confounding -- and the subject of an existential conversation. His musings unfold into a vivid tapestry of his own past, from his life as a student at Oxford to the women he loved and lusted after. As the stories and observations in David's notebooks take shape, they become an allegory for life, death, and the distortions of memory.