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The Book of Memory Gaps

The Book of Memory Gaps by Cecilia Ruiz is a beautifully illustrated series of short tales featuring characters that have different types of memory loss. Thoughtful, beautiful and poetic, the words accompanying each photo are just enough to tell the story.

An illustration of a character named Natascha from The Book of Memory Gaps by Cecilia Ruiz. She is a small girl in a coat and hat standing on a stack of books by a full bookshelf and she is reaching for a book.

Natascha constantly has words on the tip of her tongue. She keeps feeling she is about to remember, but they never come. She spends her days searching for all of her missing words.

An illustration of a character named Viktor from The Book of Memory Gaps by Cecilia Ruiz. He is on a boat in the ocean waving towards the shore where his wife is standing next to a lighthouse.

Every evening, Viktor arrived home on the same shore, thinking that he had been at sea for months. His wife would be there to welcome him, though he had left that same morning. Sadly for him, his wife’s excitement could never equal his own.

An illustration of a character named Veronika from The Book of Memory Gaps by Cecilia Ruiz. She is sitting at a table smelling aflower. On the wall behind her are shelves filled with bottles in varying sizes.

Veronika was bad at faces but good with smells. She learned to make perfumes and gave them to the ones she loved so she might know when they were near.

The epiloge is a quote by one of my favorite story tellers.
We are our memory,
we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,
that pile of broken mirrors.
–Jorge Luis Borges’s 1969 poem “Cambridge”