Author/Educator
NEW NOVEL OUT SOON!
COMING SOON FROM LEGACY BOOK PRESS
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COMING SOON FROM LEGACY BOOK PRESS *
My debut novel, Loss of Life will be available in June 2026.
AVAILABLE JUNE 2026
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AVAILABLE JUNE 2026 *
In a Virginia hospital, forty-one-year old Matthew Winton awakens from a car accident with no memory of his life after the age of thirteen. Over time, he learns that he is a college professor who lives alone and has no family. He is also a writer, and he turns first to his writing, hoping it will show him his past. But he has written primarily fiction, and he struggles to separate the blurred lines between fiction and fact. He is helped by a policewoman who investigated his accident, and a relationship develops.
Then he comes upon something he’d written shortly before the crash. This writing disturbs him greatly and leads to a series of events that end with him traveling to Massachusetts, where he spent the first thirty years of his life, in search of ghosts from his past. Throughout, he’s been troubled by questions raised by the car accident.
What was he doing out on a deserted country road at two o’clock on a Sunday morning? He had no luggage in the car, nor anything that might have given a clue to his intentions. Even the policewoman who investigated seems to have questions about whether the crash was really an accident. As Matthew learns more about his past, he fears that his search might end back on that deserted country road at two a.m.
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT LOSS OF LIFE
…I devoured Mark Farrington’s novel Loss of Life because I had to know what would become of protagonist Matthew Winton’s quest to recover his lost memories. With wit, humor, compassion, and a mastery of fiction technique, Farrington has created an earnest, yet imperfect, character with a pitch perfect voice. Written in sparse, elegant prose and with much humanity, Loss of Life offers a fresh narrative about how the act of writing can both unearth the painful stories that define us and offer an opportunity for healing, redemption, and renewal.
Michelle Brafman. author of Swimming with Ghosts and Draw Near to Me
…In Mark Farrington’s debut novel, Matthew Winton, a man with partial retrograde amnesia, wakes in a room after his initially undisclosed single car accident, his eyes sticky and closed, and remembers the word for his immediate need: water. An attendant provides ice chips. The novel then develops from Winton’s loss of life slowly remembered and rexperienced by recalling aspects of his current life as a professor in Virginia and then of his childhood and developing life in the Berkshires of Massachusetts where he was born and raised. The tone and pacing and insights of Farrington’s book allow the reader to also experience and feel the precisely rendered scenes that eventually occur in real time in places and with people after Winton drives to the Berkshires. This is a novel of pain and loss, of forgiveness, but also of love found and love remembered. It is also the story of a man learning to release the unreasonable blame of self he’s carried for decades. He is Matthew Winton, and you, reader, are not likely to forget him.
David Giannini. author of Stones Are the First to Rise
…Loss of Life is a compelling drama that explores the impacts of trauma in insightful and poignant ways. Farrington expertly guides us through the unintended impacts of a troubled past in sometimes colorful and sometimes bittersweet ways that truly explore what it means to lose your sense of self and your sense of safety through memory loss. At times funny, at other times devastating, Loss of Life explores the trauma of facing your past with great humility and humanity.
Jessica Stilling. author of Betwixt & Between and The Beekeeper’s Daughter
