Scapegoat, The, Sara Davis
Scapegoat, The, Sara Davis
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Scapegoat, The

Author: Sara Davis

Narrator: Michael Brusasco

Unabridged: 5 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/05/2021


Synopsis

N is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father?unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. His investigation leads him to a hotel built over a former Spanish mission, a site with a dark power and secrets all its own. On campus, a chance meeting with a young doctor provokes uncomfortable feelings about the direction of his life, and N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa and a shameful episode from his past.Meanwhile, a shadowy group of fringe academics surfaces in relation to his fathers death. Their preoccupation with a grim chapter in Californias history runs like a surreal parallel to the staid world of academic life, where Ns relations with his colleagues grow more and more hostile. As he comes closer to the heart of the mystery, his ability to distinguish between delusion and reality begins to erode, and he is forced to confront disturbing truths about himself: his irrational antagonism toward a young female graduate student, certain libidinal impulses, and a capacity for violence. Is he the author of his own investigation? Or is he the unwitting puppet of a larger conspiracy?

About Sara Davis

Sara Davis is the author of The Scapegoat. The daughter of two Stanford immunologists, she grew up in Palo Alto, California, and received her BA and MFA at Columbia University. She has taught creative writing in New York City and Detroit and has been awarded residencies from Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. She currently lives in Shanghai, China.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lark on April 03, 2021

The Scapegoat is a unique and upending reading experience. Every sentence on its own seems to exist nearly in the world of the rational, at least enough for me to keep reading with my guard down, and to keep thinking 'well, that's a little weird, but understandable...' and then before very long I re......more

Goodreads review by eindra on December 29, 2020

ok, this fucked me up. i have been fucked the fuck up. i've never thought so hard about a book after finishing it. i, as i always do, read this right before going to bed and it plagued my dreams. over and over again i asked myself, what...really...happened...? where was the 'beginning'? who's invest......more

Goodreads review by Blair on December 23, 2021

Making notes about this book while midway through, I wrote, ‘I have realised that I love books where the world of the story feels small and cosy’. But by the end, the sense that the protagonist’s world could be described thus has been turned upside down and inside out. It starts as a middle-aged man......more

Goodreads review by Fanna on June 14, 2021

In the Bay Area of sunny San Francisco, what starts as an investigation into the death of the narrator's father soon turns into a fever dream that rings with surrealism, hilarity, and mystifying sequences. Losing his father to suspicious circumstances has compelled N, a university employee, to carry......more

Goodreads review by Alix on February 04, 2021

The Scapegoat is an intriguing, dreamlike mystery. The narrator is clearly unreliable and you can’t trust anything he says. It’s up to you to put the pieces together to figure out what’s really happening. And what a surreal journey it is. The narrator is rather pathetic but that could be due to chil......more