All You Took From Me
Set between the Blue Mountains and a Sydney hospital, Lisa Kenway’s All You Took From Me is a thriller brimming with great characters and nail-biting tension.
Anaesthetist Clare Carpenter has just lost her husband and her memory in a single-vehicle accident. So why is a stranger following her? After questioning patients about their dreams, she becomes convinced that an anaesthetic drug might help her access missing memories. But there’s no way to be certain without jeopardising her career or her life.
As unexplained threats escalate, Clare realises she must take matters into her own hands to learn the uncomfortable truth about her secretive husband, his connection to a mysterious club and what she did to trigger a stranger’s crusade for vengeance. But how far will she go?
‘Truly exciting. It’s a rare treat to read a book that I am still thinking about long after the last page — the surprising reveals are both earned and satisfying. Readers are destined to fall in love with the ways Kenway brings such expertise and a unique perspective to the psychological thriller genre.’ — Shelley Burr, author of Wake and Ripper
‘A taut psychological thriller with a driving plot, All You Took From Me interrogates the limits of memory, both lost and recovered. From its compelling opening mystery, every page bristles with threat and intrigue.’ — Ashley Kalagian Blunt, bestselling author of Dark Mode
‘Kenway brings an exciting level of insider authenticity to this simmering drama about an anaesthetist struggling to make sense of a life unspooling in the aftermath of a tragic accident. Tense, twisty and unique, this is an unforgettable debut.’ — Anna Downes, author of The Safe Place and Red River Road
‘I found myself first pulled in by the prose — Kenway writes like a dream — but soon I was consumed by the mystery at the heart of the story – the question of where we go and what happens to us under the narcotic oblivion of anaesthesia. Charged with menace and paranoia, this is a masterfully plotted psychological thriller.’ — J.P. Pomare, author of In The Clearing and 17 Years Later
Lisa Kenway is an Australian writer and anaesthetist, and her debut novel was inspired by her longstanding fascination with memory and consciousness. An earlier version of All You Took From Me was listed for the 2020 Richell Prize and was runner-up in the 2022 CYA conference competition (stories for adults). Lisa was awarded a Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre fellowship for 2023 and was highly commended in the 2022 Writing NSW Varuna fellowships. Her work has been published widely in journals and anthologies including Island Online, the Meanjin blog and Meniscus Literary Journal.
