Year of Monkey

In the year she turns forty-(something) and during the Chinese “Year of the Monkey,” Patti Smith embarks on journeys, both physical (along the California coast, the desert) and metaphysical (through memory, loss, art). She reflects on friends dying, aging, the creative process, coffee shops at dawn and vivid dreams. Meditations on mortality and rebirth appear alongside photographs, Polaroids and spontaneous encounters. The result is a rambly, elegiac and surprising memoir that resists conventional structure and invites the reader into the “middle of the unexplained.” (PenguinRandomhouse.com)