James Stephens
A Suspect Quartet is the fourth book in The Suspect Speaker Series. It has four novelettes (well, three longer short stories and one novelette) about people with aphasia. The stories are gritty, tragic, funny, and romantic.Aphasia is the loss of a previously held ability to speak or understand spoken or written language, due to disease or brain injury, mainly stroke. The other three books had shorter and longer versions for each story. This is not the case for A Suspect Quartet but each one has short chapters, easier to deal with if your reading (or listening) stamina is limited. The subjects are various: A celebrated but depressed artist and his protege, a Sci-Fi tale about a survivor of an explosion, a hunky adrenalin junky looking for meaning, and a fantasy involving an apprentice magician and his friends.
