“In HERE LIES MEMORY Doug Rice loves his characters wondrously, keenly, completely, and the result is a novel at once stunningly beautiful, brilliant, fierce, crazily imaginative, and acutely wise about how the ghosts that our memories and words invent are often the last things to leave us, no matter what, how some stay so deep in our skin they become as real as its color — especially those that can damage and mend us most.” —Lance Olsen, author of THEORIES OF FORGETTING

HERE LIES MEMORY explores the place of memory in living, daily, scarred and sacred lives. Two Pittsburgh families struggle to survive trauma and love. A man wills himself to go blind, not to forget, but to remember in new ways. Another man drinks beer after beer until he can no longer drink away what he must face directly. This novel reveals what language and photographs do to memory, desire, and love, and what gentrification is doing to the souls of families and neighborhoods.

MORE ADVANCE PRAISE for Doug Rice’s stunning new novel:

“Covering all of the bases in this novel bent on conveying a deep love for the city and the people of Pittsburgh, Doug Rice ultimately makes our lives feel more dignified, loved, no matter if our local language and essence of being have become displaced. I’ve got no words for what Rice accomplishes. Just that, he beautifully brings to light everything in The ‘Burgh – and in places of the heart – that was done in the dark.”
—Ricardo Cortez Cruz, author of STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

“How does memory write us? What fictions haunt our bodies and lives, and what truths do we construct to carry the weight of our selves? Doug Rice designs a brutally beautiful helix from dual narratives woven by and through love and loss. Between blindness and insight there live characters who, like all of us, story a way to go on in the face of buildings decaying, cities disappearing, hearts and bodies slipping toward ghost. Mother, sister, wife, grandfather, grandson, girl, boy…all identities move through desire, love, memory, and language in a place called Pittsburgh. Reading this book made my skin sing, my heart wail, a secular hymn of the body. “
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of THE SMALL BACKS OF CHILDREN