The Forgetters Books in Order

The Forgetters is Dave Eggers’s long term experiment in publishing a novel in pieces. Instead of waiting for one big book, he is releasing short, self contained stories as small hardcovers that can be read on their own now and will eventually lock together into a larger mosaic. Each volume is physically compact, often under a hundred pages, but emotionally dense.

The series began with The Museum of Rain, in which an older Army veteran walks with a gaggle of grand nieces and nephews through the hills of California’s Central Coast. As they climb toward a place that may or may not still exist, he tells family stories and tries to explain what it means to curate your own memories the ones you display, the ones you hide, and the ones you let go.

Later installments, including The Keeper of the Ornaments, The Comebacker, and Where the Candles Are Kept, stay close to that territory of remembrance and small turning points. They often start from a modest object or ritual a box of holiday decorations, a long delayed apology, the practical question of what gets saved in a power outage and then slowly open into questions about family loyalty, aging, and the way people misremember one another.

Although the protagonists differ from book to book, there is a consistent tone. The narrators tend to be reflective, sometimes funny in a dry way, sometimes quietly overwhelmed by the past. The settings feel recognizably American coastal towns, suburbs, stretches of highway but Eggers tends to leave out brand names and sharp dates so that scenes hover just outside of any one news cycle.

Because every story is complete in itself, you can pick up any Forgetters volume as a stand alone reading experience. Taken together, though, patterns begin to emerge recurring phrases, echoes of scenes, hints that minor characters in one book loom larger in another. Part of the pleasure is sensing how the eventual full novel might weave these glimpses into something more continuous.

This page keeps track of the Forgetters titles as they appear, explains how they connect, and suggests possible reading paths whether you want a single brief story about memory, or you are curious to follow Eggers’s slow building project as it unfolds over the coming years.