Foreign correspondent Marcus Aurelius Hardy comes back to Niagara Falls when his aging mother, Elen, wanders barefoot in a snowstorm. As an Armenian American, Elen is haunted by the ghosts of the Genocide that tore her family apart, and Marcus carries a secret that, if revealed, could shatter the bond between them.
At home, he reconnects with his estranged father, a would-be rock star whose absence left deep scars, and with Arch Printup, his childhood friend, still haunted by a cousin’s mysterious death over the Falls. In a town shaped by memory, grief, and loss, every decision echoes with the past, and every relationship carries the weight of history.

Praise for Memory Falls

“In Memory Falls Mark Jacobs proves yet again that he was born to tell stories about the staggered beauties we are, the ways we stay hunted and haunted by heredity, and what we owe one another beneath a heaven that will not hear. He knows these people and places with a startling intimacy, and you will come to know them too, and in the process call this novel what it undeniably is: an example of what a literary writer can accomplish when he has mastered his art.”

—William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark

“As I sped through Memory Falls’s raw-boned yet refined story of love and friendship and family and racial history, I kept thinking about how so many languages have two words for the verb to know, one referring to the knowledge of facts and the other to the knowledge of feelings—a distinction that English, much to its speakers’ detriment, fails to make. Consider this novel Mark Jacobs’s attempt to make up for that deficit. ‘There are circumstances,’ one of his characters says, ‘when forgiving one person is the betrayal of another.’ Here lies the conflict at the core of so much of Jacobs’s work, namely, the moral tension between articulated reason, which is what makes us civilized beings, and the untranslatable language of the blood, which is what makes us human. Memory Falls may be Jacobs’s clearest and most empathic depiction yet of that struggle in his vast and woefully under-appreciated oeuvre.”

—Dale Peck, author of Night Soil and What Burns

“Marcus Aurelius Hardy, the main character in Mark Jacobs’ great new novel, Memory Falls, takes us with him on a wonderful ride, made so by Mr. Jacobs’ always fine writing. Whether we are in the throes of learning about the early twentieth-century Armenian genocide, through the memory and research of Marcus’s unforgiving mother; learning of the hard-scrabble Native American life up and around Niagara Falls, through Marcus’s childhood best friend, Arch; traipsing through the dusty halls of old rock and roll with his guitar-master dad; or hoping against hope for a rekindling of the one great love of Marcus’s life, we are always held firmly in the hands of a master. What I like most about this novel is that it is always a story and never not a story, yet I come away having been taught so very much. Memory Falls will go on my ‘Favorite Books’ shelf, where it belongs. I know you will like it as much as I do.”

—Richard Wiley, author of The Grievers’ Group and Tacoma Stories

“Memory Falls, like all of the fiction of Mark Jacobs, is exquisitely written, probing, unforgettable, and heart-piercing. This is a story of the ever-present past and how we relive it, reshape it, obscure it, and how it can become the very breath we breathe. In between the lines of this powerful narrative is the author’s knowledge of how stories can heal and how they can save us, if only we let them.”

—Marita Golden, author of The Wide Circumference of Love

“A touching and thoughtful novel, Memory Falls is a compelling book written by a skilled novelist. All of his chapters have something to say to us, and the story he tells is written with grace, imagination, and insight. Read slowly for what Mark Jacobs has to say sheds light on all of our lives.”

—John Coyne, author of Long Ago and Far Away

“I’ve never read a book that explores memory with such complexity, nuance, and insight. In Memory Falls, his finest novel to date, Mark Jacobs reminds us how the past can intrude into the present, regardless of our desire to forget. His brilliant descriptions of settings as familiar as Niagara Falls set the stage for his memorable cast of characters as they struggle to find balance between remembering and forgetting without getting pulled over the falls. When memory and emotion talk to each other, they often get mistranslated, buried, solidified, liquified, depending on the circumstances. In this brilliant book, memories never go away, even when they do.”

—Jim Daniels, author of An Ignorance of Trees

“Memory, along with the fear of losing it, is a presence throughout Memory Falls, Mark Jacobs’s aptly-named novel, since the story is set in the proximity of Niagara Falls and deals with a group of close-knit characters wrestling with aspects of their past they wish, yet also do not wish, to forget. Some of these memories are monumental—the Armenian Genocide—while others are deeply personal, but all form part of the compelling fabric Jacobs’s masterful storytelling illumines. One cares about these people, what happens and has happened to them. Jacobs creates, through empathy, insight, and consummate narrative skill, a world the reader would not have known and is grateful to have been ushered into.”

—Bruce Bennett, author of Navigating the Distances: Poems New and Selected