A solid, fast-paced thriller, with a mind-bending plot where people find themselves having lifetimes of memory of a life they didn’t live. The mechanism behind these “false memories” has far-reaching, global, existential consequences. Our two main characters, Barry and Helena, find themselves in the position of being the only people who have any chance of stopping the gathering chaos - but hope seems slim. To say much else would be to give away more than is in the blurb - which I don’t want to do.
The entire story - including the main jeopardy, and some delicate nuances of what our heroes need to do to save the day - has a foundation on a characteristic of the main plot device that I found very difficult to believe, and was never properly explained. There’s even a bit of “lampshade hanging” that goes on when one character incredulously queries whether or not this surprising characteristic is really true, and another character simply says “Apparently”.
For a while, this was niggling at my enjoyment of the story, but it does result in some really thorny and interesting problems for our heroes to solve, and a genuinely exciting escalation of jeopardy towards the end of the book. So is it forgiven? Well, mostly.
This is thoroughly plot-driven story, but with a couple of very solid main characters. There is some romance, and the blurb refers to the book as “a deeply emotional story about time and loss and grief”, which, for me, is overstating the emotional content enormously. Yes, there is a believable connection between the two main characters, and the impact that this has on their decisions, and outcomes, make sense - but I never felt the emotion of their relationship. However, this isn’t to say that the book is without an emotional impact: some of the climactic sequences towards the end of the book are quite raw - and appropriately so.
If I’d have felt the emotion between the main characters, and if my suspension of disbelief hadn’t been so robustly challenged, then it would have been a firm 5 stars. But it’s still a solid, page-turning thriller, based on a unique, imaginative, and interestingly complex central premise.
My rating: ★★★★☆
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