Retrovision

A novel by Robert W. Termanini, MD

A literary forensic thriller about a neurosurgeon who, years after the murder of his lover, grafts her preserved brain tissue into his young daughter to save her life, and the child who becomes the only witness against the man who killed a woman she has never met.

Currently seeking representation.

“What must the child pay for the parent’s sin?”

A neurologist and neuroscientist. A debut novelist. RETROVISION is his first book.

The Author

I write about the moment survival stops being simple, and the cost begins to speak, fiction at the edge of memory, identity, medicine, and moral consequence.

I am a neurologist and neuroscientist who writes fiction.

Twenty years as a medical doctor, with expertise in clinical medicine, neuroscience, and human behavior, have taught me that the brain is not merely an organ. It is the architecture of the self, the instrument through which experience becomes meaning, and the tissue in which memory, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves to remain coherent are laid down at a level beneath conscious access. I have spent my professional life watching that architecture operate at its limits: under disease, under injury, under trauma, and under the ordinary stresses that test what a person can carry and still remain themselves.

I came to fiction because fiction can enter the human territory that clinical language can only approach. A chart can record the diagnosis, the lesion, the deficit, and the treatment plan. It cannot record what it feels like to lose, find, or remake oneself inside a brain that is no longer cooperating. It cannot hold the private architecture of fear, grief, memory, love, guilt, and survival without flattening it into categories. Fiction can. It is where the unsaid can remain precise, where damage can be rendered without spectacle, and where the interior life of a person can be taken seriously without being reduced.

My first novel, RETROVISION, is a literary forensic thriller built at the intersection of neurosurgery, evidence, and inheritance. It asks what a child owes the dead, what the body keeps after the mind has finished forgetting, and what it costs a father to save his daughter when the saving requires an act no profession can sanction. The novel is grounded in clinical neuroscience, medical ethics, surgical context, and the biological language of tissue, memory, and injury. The questions it raises about memory, embodiment, and moral consequence have followed me from clinical practice and surgical observation to the writing desk for the better part of two decades.

I live and write in the United States. For literary representation, press, and speaking, see .

Retrovision

A Literary Forensic Thriller

In 1979, neurosurgeon Samuel Becker finds Marta Christensen, the young Danish woman he has loved in secret, dying in his family’s greenhouse after an attack no one else witnesses. In the aftermath of the violence that has already destroyed the Becker estate that night, Samuel removes and preserves a small sample of Marta’s cortical tissue. He has no defensible reason to keep it. He keeps it anyway.

Nearly a decade later, when his daughter Amelia is six, Samuel discovers a high-grade glioma in the left temporal-parietal region of her brain. He performs the resection himself. In the moment when her survival narrows to an impossible choice, he grafts Marta’s preserved tissue into the surgical bed. The procedure is unprecedented, unauthorized, and undocumented. Amelia lives.

After the surgery, Amelia begins producing sensory fragments connected to a night she could not possibly have witnessed. A greenhouse she has never entered. The pressure of a hand at her throat. A Danish word for beloved she has never been taught. The case has been closed for a decade. With her testimony, it begins to come apart, and so does Samuel.

The Book

RETROVISION is a multigenerational literary forensic thriller about what we save, what we lose in the saving, and what the body keeps after the mind has finished forgetting. It is grounded in clinical realism, surgical anatomy, and the moral pressure of medicine, and structured as a slow-burn procedural in which the reader knows the killer long before the lawyers do.

116,723 Words / 422 Pages

For readers of Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods, Chris Whitaker’s We Begin at the End, and Tana French’s The Likeness.

For Agents & Editors

The full manuscript, a two-page synopsis, and the property’s identity and adaptation materials are available on request to qualified literary agents, editors, and rights professionals.

“Are we born free, or born already owed?”

Speaking

I speak to audiences who want intellectual depth delivered with emotional intelligence and narrative force.

Drawing from expertise in medicine, neuroscience, human behavior, and a literary engagement with the human condition, my talks move between scientific insight and human story. They are written for audiences who do not want to choose between rigor and accessibility, and who would rather leave a room thinking than leave it cheered.

Signature Talks

  • The Brain as Storyteller: memory, narrative, and the architecture of identity.
  • Inherited Trauma and the Body as Archive.
  • Forensic Truth and the Architecture of Secrecy.
  • Why Physicians Read Fiction, and Why Fiction Reads Physicians.
  • The Cognitive Science of Suicide Prevention.
  • Physician Suicide, Burnout, and the Long Work of Staying in the Room.

Available for Booking

Available for universities, medical institutions, literary festivals, professional conferences, and healthcare, technology, and knowledge-sector audiences. Topics can be adapted for keynote lectures, moderated conversations, panels, workshops, and institutional events.

Press & Media

For Journalists

Robert W. Termanini, MD is available for interviews on the following subjects:

  • →The neuroscience of memory and the architecture of experience.
  • →Inherited trauma and the body as archive.
  • →The forensic and ethical territory at the intersection of medicine and law.
  • →The cognitive foundations of narrative and the craft of fiction.
  • →Medical ethics and the moral demands of clinical practice.
  • →The mind under threat: what neuroscience has taught us about violence, witness, and recovery.
  • →Why a neurologist writes fiction.

Press Resources

High-resolution press photographs, three biography lengths, a one-page property summary, and the cover image, when available, can be provided upon request.

Press kit available upon request.

Professional Links

LinkedIn

Doximity

Contact

Literary & Rights

For literary representation, foreign rights, adaptation, press, speaking, and professional inquiries:

robert@drtermanini.com

Professional Links

LinkedIn

Doximity

A Note on Correspondence

I read every message that reaches me directly and answer what I can. Response times are typically seven to ten days. I am not currently able to respond to unsolicited manuscript submissions or blurb requests. Inquiries sent to the address above are read with care.