The Confessions of Max Tivoli

So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backwards - on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child. When Max is seventeen, he falls in love with a neighbour girl, Alice, who ages normally. Max, of course, does not; as a young man, he has an older man's body. But his curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him, she takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love. Set against the backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max's confessions are written in a prose that is beautifully modulated; its tale of love lost then found achieves an emotional resonance that is unforgettable.