MEMORY REBORN

This thought-provoking SF novel by author Nedeau painstakingly details the fragility of identity.

Darien Mamon is spoiled rich kid who’s had to find his own way after his parents’ deaths in an accident. After he was expelled from college in Miami for cheating, Darien scraped by with a series of badly paying coding jobs; then he was diagnosed with cancer, and its treatment left him in a deep, deep hole financially. That’s why the job offer from MemorSingular was a godsend. He’s now employed as a grunt at the MemorSingular memory-storage facility in Tucson, Arizona, working in a converted missile silo, and he works with the company’s renowned Dr. Hollister as the subject of cutting-edge memory experiments. But the experiments have a side effect: Darien begins having memories that are unfamiliar but also feel very real, and when he finds out the reason for the strange recollections, it comes as a shock—although it also explains why Hollister has been trying to eliminate Darien’s fear of heights. To escape his fate at Hollister’s hands, Darien enlists the help of Nancy, his ex-girlfriend's best friend who hates him, and her fellow rebels at South Miami Technical College. Over the course of this thriller, Nedeau slickly crafts a sinister twist on the reason why people’s memories blur as they age. The author plants the seed for the huge plot twist early on, then slyly veers away from it, making the reader think that Darien is simply suffering from some kind of mental breakdown. Nedeau also accomplishes the surprising feat of making the unpleasant protagonist likable by novel’s end; Darien is shown to mature as he learns that he’s not the only victim of the conspiracy at the heart of the story. The supporting cast members aren’t as nuanced as the main character, but they do play their roles well in the suspenseful narrative.

A tense read with an impressive reveal and an unpredictable conclusion.