Best known as one of Britain's great science fiction writers, Brian Aldiss occasionally turned his attention toward more intimate terrain. 

Forgotten Life is a novel about family memory, old age and the strange persistence of the past. When Clement and Sheila inherit a cache of wartime letters written decades earlier, they find that the correspondence slowly reconstructs a life otherwise slipping from memory, forcing the present to negotiate with histories that have never quite finished happening.

Aldiss writes with the same curiosity about time that marks his speculative fiction, but here the machinery is entirely human. Memory proves fragmentary, archival and unreliable; personal history survives in letters, anecdotes and silences rather than grand events. It is a thoughtful, understated novel about the ways ordinary lives become history almost without noticing, and about how families continue editing themselves long after the people involved have disappeared.

First UK edition, first printing. Published by Victor Gollancz, London, 1988. Near fine in a near fine unclipped dust jacket. Binding remains tight and square with clean pages throughout. A very well-preserved first edition.