The Amnesiac by Sam Taylor

James Purdew enjoys an uncomplicated lifestyle in Amsterdam with his girlfriend Ingrid. When she suggests they move to the suburbs, James eyes the future uncertainly, choosing to return to the UK. During a chance encounter, Ingrid's brother tells James that Ingrid hopes he sorts things out with Anna. The name means nothing to us. It doesn't seem to mean much to James either.

The first traps have been laid. James has become obsessed with remembering a forgotten period of his life - three years he spent at university in England. He possesses boxes of diaries, but the box marked 1991-94 is locked. On his return to the city of H, he transforms himself into a detective. He is determined to discover the meaning of a fragment of a song lyric, the image of a girl turning away and a freeze-frame of a couple walking hand-in-hand down a terraced street. He takes on a renovation job for a secretive employer, working on a house he begins to believe he may once have lived in, where he discovers a partial manuscript: "Confessions of a Killer."

It's the second significant manuscript in the novel, for James has started work on his "Memoirs of an Amnesiac". The latter demands to be written in reverse chronology, which will remind cine-literate readers of Christopher Nolan's Memento, which itself bore remarkable plot similarities to Trevor Hoyle's 1992 novel Blind Needle. Sam Taylor's avowed literary antecedents are acknowledged in a lengthy roll-call, including Borges and Stevenson.

Numerous manuscripts mean multiple narrators. The narrator of the main story surfaces from time to time, switching the tense from past to present. He insists on calling the port city H, rather than Hull, in spite of James's encounter with a grumpy librarian who claims to be Philip Larkin. Is he seeking to lend the narrative a 19th-century feel? Or inviting us to assume that this is not Hull but Hell?

Taylor is very good on the texture of memory and the awkwardness of adolescent relationships. But there's a danger that James's solipsism becomes unsympathetic before being acknowledged as integral to the plot.

Key to the novel's secrets is a passage in which James looks at photographs of himself as a baby and fails to recognise any link between then and now. His family watch a murder mystery on TV and talk about red herrings, something Taylor has enormous fun with: especially cryptic is the Czech philosopher Tomas Ryal.