The Buried Giant is set in Britain in the mysterious time a few decades after King Arthur's death. It's the perfect setting for an exploration of the way memories fade and resurface and how we feel about them.
Axl and Beatrice are an old couple who vaguely recall a son who left home to live elsewhere. In their village, a warren of half-underground dwellings, faltering as their memories may be, the couple has a better grasp on even the recent past than their neighbors do. When a strange woman arrives with whom Beatrice risks speaking, her never-completely submerged wish to visit their son surges back. She and Axl set out to find him. As they journey, their wish to dispel the mist of forgetfulness―said to be the breath of a dragon―that has spread across the land becomes as important as their search for their son.
Along the way, they meet sinister pixies and ravening, misshapen beasts. They meet a Saxon warrior who thinks Axl looks like a man he once admired. They meet an elderly Briton encased in armor. They spend time with a community of quarreling monks. The way Axl and Beatrice begin piecing together the story of their past gives their tale the gripping quality of a mystery, and their less and less half-hearted quest to find the source of the mist of forgetfulness and sweep it away gives their journey an ever-strengthening momentum.
"Is it not better," a monk asks them, "some things remain hidden from our minds?" But Beatrice wants her memories. She answers, "We'll have the bad ones come back too, even if they make us weep or shake with anger. For isn't it the life we've shared?" As glimmers of sad or infuriating memories begin to emerge, though, she feels less confident. Does love―always the highest value in this dreamy novel―sometimes depend on forgetting? (2015, 317 pages)