On his twenty-first birthday, Maximilian Ponder shut himself away from the world to embark on his greatest project: an attempt to record every memory in his brain. It should have taken three years. But three long decades pass. Now Max lies dead, surrounded by his magnum opus - The Catalogue - a library of notebooks and journals that he hoped would form the map of a single human mind. And before his friend Adam can call the police and inform them of Max's death, one rather gruesome task remains . . .
Now Adam tells the story of the man he knew - a man whose life changed dramatically the day he buried a dead Labrador and fought a duel with his father. What emerges is both the story of a friendship and also of a lifelong obsession, a quest to understand how we construct the story of our lives.

John Ironmonger was born and grew up in East Africa. He has a doctorate in zoology, and was once an expert on freshwater leeches. He is the author of The Good Zoo Guide and the novels The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder (shortlisted for the 2012 Costa First Novel Prize and the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize), The Coincidence Authority and The Whale at the End of the World (an international bestseller). He has also been part of a world record team for speed reading Shakespeare, has driven across the Sahara in a £100 banger, and once met Jared Diamond in a forest in the middle of Sumatra.