Before I Forget

Cricket Campbell is twenty-six, unmoored, and quietly falling apart when her father's Alzheimer's diagnosis forces a reckoning she has been avoiding for years. Set against the muted beauty of an Adirondack lake house, Tory Henwood Hoen's debut novel follows Cricket as she returns home to care for her aging father Arthur, hoping to mend a fractured relationship before memory steals him entirely. What she finds there defies expectation: as Arthur's grip on the past loosens, he develops an uncanny ability to see what lies ahead, turning a story about grief and stagnation into something stranger and more tender.

Barrie Kreinik brings a measured warmth to the narration that suits Cricket's guarded interiority, letting the humor land without undercutting the emotional weight beneath it. The 9-hour runtime moves with quiet momentum, and Kreinik handles the shifting registers between comedy and loss with care. Stories centered on memory and spoken recollection find a natural home in audio, and this one is no exception.