Recursion
2019
- fiction, suspense
- fiction, thrillers
- fiction, thrillers, general
- nyt:combined-print-and-e-book-fiction=2019-06-30
- fiction, thrillers, suspense
- epidemics
- fiction
- neurosciences
- memory
- police
The story
**Memory makes reality.** That’s what New York City cop Barry Sutton is learning as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome—a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. That's what neuroscientist Helena Smith believes. It’s why she’s dedicated her life to creating a technology that will let us preserve our most precious memories. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss, the birth of a child, the final moment with a dying parent. As Barry searches for the truth, he comes face-to-face with an opponent more terrifying than any disease—a force that attacks not just our minds but the very fabric of the past. And as its effects begin to unmake the world as we know it, only he and Helena, working together, will stand a chance at defeating it. But how can they make a stand when reality itself is shifting and crumbling all around them?
What it’s like
Lean, fast-cut prose with short chapters that snap forward, and a voice that stays close to a cop's gritty, sleepless head: rain-slicked New York streets, fluorescent hospital corridors, the cold blue glow of laboratory screens. Its atmosphere is unsettled and urgent, a sort of sun-bleached dread where the ground keeps shifting underfoot, and the dread is more psychological than physical. Violence is present but brief and sharp, with a few grim scenes of crime and suffering among the sick, and there is no gore for its own sake. Its sex content is minimal and the romance grows slowly out of shared desperation rather than heat. Best read in a single absorbing stretch on a long flight, late at night alone, or during a restless stretch when a propulsive page-turner is what you want. For readers who love high-concept suspense, the bittersweet pull of memory and grief, and a relationship built under pressure between two stubborn people trying to hold the world together.
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