In 1979, four teenage boys from an elite private school sexually assault a fourteen-year-old classmate -- and film the attack. Not long after, the tape goes missing and the suspected thief, a fellow classmate, is murdered. In the investigation that follows, one boy turns state's evidence and two of his peers are convicted. But the ringleader escapes without a trace. Now it's 1989 and one of the perpetrators, Fritz McCabe, has been released from prison....

John Dos Passos Prize winner and two-time Pulitzer nominee Russell Banks is an American literary master. In Lost Memory of Skin he tells the tale of the Kid, who must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Enter the Professor, a university sociologist who finds the Kid a perfect subject for his research. "Banks is in top form [with] a commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel of private...