06/10/2026
“When I lost my memory, a part of me feared it might never return, but a larger part believed that when it did return, all the pieces would fall into place, my past would be settled, even resolved, and I’d be able to move on. What I learned is that the past is never settled, its effects linger in the fabric of your being.”—from Chapter Twenty-Two, Loss of Life
Congratulations to faculty member Mark Farrington on the publication of his novel this month, LOSS of LIFE.
Flap copy reads:
In a Virginia hospital, forty-one-year-old Matthew Winton awakens from a car accident with no memory of his life after the age of thirteen. Over time, he learns that he is a college professor who lives alone and has no family. He is also a writer, and he turns first to his writing, hoping it will show him his past. But he has written primarily fiction, and he struggles to separate the blurred lines between fiction and fact. He is helped by a policewoman who investigated his accident, and a relationship develops.
Then he comes upon something he’d written shortly before the crash. This writing disturbs him greatly and leads to a series of events that end with him traveling to Massachusetts, where he spent the first thirty years of his life, in search of ghosts from his past. Throughout, he’s been troubled by questions raised by the car accident. What was he doing out on a deserted country road at two o’clock on a Sunday morning? Was the crash even an accident?
A book about facing the people who harmed us as well as the people we harmed, Loss of Life is a poignant reminder that we’re all the totality of what we’ve done.
Advance Praise for Loss of Life
“I devoured Mark Farrington’s novel Loss of Life because I had to know what would become of protagonist Matthew Winton’s quest to recover his lost memories. With wit, humor, compassion, and a mastery of fiction technique, Farrington has created an earnest, yet imperfect, character with a pitch perfect voice. Written in sparse, elegant prose and with much humanity, Loss of Life offers a fresh narrative about how the act of writing can both unearth the painful stories that define us and offer an opportunity for healing, redemption, and renewal.”
—Michelle Brafman. author of Swimming with Ghosts and Draw Near to Me
“In Mark Farrington’s debut novel, Matthew Winton, a man with partial retrograde amnesia, wakes in a room after his initially undisclosed single car accident, his eyes sticky and closed, and remembers the word for his immediate need: water. An attendant provides ice chips. The novel then develops from Winton’s loss of life slowly remembered and reexperienced by recalling aspects of his current life as a professor in Virginia and then of his childhood and developing life in the Berkshires of Massachusetts where he was born and raised. The tone and pacing and insights of Farrington’s book allow the reader to also experience and feel the precisely rendered scenes that eventually occur in real time in places and with people after Winton drives to the Berkshires. This is a novel of pain and loss, of forgiveness, but also of love found and love remembered. It is also the story of a man learning to release the unreasonable blame of self he’s carried for decades. He is Matthew Winton, and you, reader, are not likely to forget him.”
—David Giannini, author of Stones Are the First to Rise
“Loss of Life is a compelling drama that explores the impacts of trauma in insightful and poignant ways. Farrington expertly guides us through the unintended impacts of a troubled past in sometimes colorful and sometimes bittersweet ways that truly explore what it means to lose your sense of self and your sense of safety through memory loss. At times funny, at other times devastating, Loss of Life explores the trauma of facing your past with great humility and humanity.”
—Jessica Stilling. author of Betwixt & Between and The Beekeeper’s Daughter
In a Virginia hospital, forty-one-year-old Matthew Winton awakens from a car accident with no memory of his life after the age of thirteen. Over time, he learns that he is a college professor who lives alone and has no family. He is also a writer, and he turns first to his writing, hoping it wil...
