A powerful and heartbreaking novel about love, memory and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves and about each other. Laub's main preoccupation is with the emotional fault-lines that emerge within relationships. "Diary of a Fall "obsessively revisits a key moment in the narrator's youth, slowly linking it to larger questions about how his family has coped with remembrance and oblivion. We never know the name of the narrator of Laub's novel. He is a man in his late thirties or early forties, and married to his third wife, with whom -- as we learn in the book's last pages she is expecting a child. It is to this unborn child that he is telling the story. Or, to be precise -- the stories. Memories are central to one strand of the novel, concerning the narrator's father. Half way through the book we discover that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer''s disease. This, too, brings into sharp focus the question of what stories we decide to tell about ourselves, and about others. Laub skilfully blends these three elements -- the fall, Auschwitz, and Alzheimer's -- to raise questions about identity and forgiveness.