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? He had no luggage in the car, nor anything that might have given a clue to his intentions. Even the policewoman who investigated seems to have questions about whether the crash was really an accident. As Matthew learns more about his past, he fears that his search might end back on that deserted country road at two a.m.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mark Farrington recently retired after nearly forty years of teaching writing, the last twenty-five of them in the MA in Writing and Teaching Writing Programs at Johns Hopkins University. He has published short stories in Carve, Craft Literary, The Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Louisville Review, and other journals, and has published creative nonfiction and articles on writing and the teaching of writing in several National Writing Project publications. Farrington’s short fiction has won the Editor’s Choice Award in the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest, the Dan Rudy Fiction Prize, second prize in the Dame Alice Throckmorton Fiction Prize, two honorable mentions for the Momaya Prize, and an Individual Artists Grant from the Virginia Commission on the Arts. He is a four-time winner of the Outstanding Faculty Award in the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program; other teaching awards include an Outstanding Service Award from the Northern Virginia Writing  Project and an Outstanding Alumni Award from the George Mason University English Department.  He grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, earned his B.A. in English and American Literature from Colby College, where he graduated cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and completed his M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from George Mason University. Farrington has recently moved to Maine with his wife Christina and their Springer Spaniel, Maddie, after living for more than thirty years just outside  Washington, D.C. Loss of Life is his first novel.