The Record of Nicholas Freydon: An Autobiography

An exiled man sits at the edge of the world, pen in hand, attempting the most intimate of rescues: to write his way toward himself. Nicholas Freydon has fled London after years of restless, turmoil-filled existence, chasing the phantom of "rest and self-comprehending peace of mind" that has eluded him his entire life. His radical experiment is this autobiography, to sequence the facts of his existence and, in seeing the whole fabric, finally understand it. What emerges is a haunting excavation of absence: a mother who died bringing him into the world, a father hollowed by his own sorrows, and the servants who became his true family in the cold corridors of English childhood. From Georgian England to the raw frontier of colonial Australia, Nicholas traces a life spent in perpetual motion, perpetually seeking. This is a quiet, devastating portrait of one man's attempt to make meaning from memory, and the troubling suspicion that understanding may be life's final, unattainable illusion.