Novelist Howard Engel’s latest book, The Man Who Forgot How to Read (HarperCollins Canada), is not one of the Benny Cooperman mysteries for which he has become known. It is a memoir of the 2001 stroke that robbed him of his ability to read while still allowing him to write. Maclean’s Brian Bethune writes about Engel’s long road to recovery.

Engel’s memoir glides over the despair that must, at times, have gripped him, and over the nuts and bolts of his struggle to recapture what he could of his past life. But in his afterword the renowned neuroscientist (and writer) Oliver Sacks, whose classic work, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, inspired Engel’s title, is more forthcoming. Determined to read again, the novelist started working away at English print letter by letter as though it was hieroglyphic, Sacks notes, doing consciously what had been automatic. Engel had also brought his other senses to bear, tracing with his tongue the shapes of letters on the roof of his mouth or writing them in the air with his finger. Sacks calls Engel’s story one “of heroic determination, a testament to the resilience and creative adaptation of one man and his brain.”

What had truly sparked Sacks’s admiration was the fact — the neuroscientist calls it “astonishing” — that while struggling to bring his reading up to Grade 3 level, Engel had actually written an entire Cooperman novel.