Title: Tell Me an Ending

Author: Jo Harkin

Publisher: Scribner 2022

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 448

Rating: 2/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Spring TBR

What if you didn't have to live with your worst memories?

Across the world, thousands of people are shocked by a notification that they once chose to have a memory removed. Now they are being given an opportunity to get that memory back. Four individuals are filled with new doubts, grappling with the unexpected question of whether to remember unknown events, or to leave them buried forever.

Finn, an Irish architect living in the Arizona desert, begins to suspect his charming wife of having an affair. Mei, a troubled grad school dropout in Kuala Lumpur, wonders why she remembers a city she has never visited. William, a former police inspector in England, struggles with PTSD, the breakdown of his marriage, and his own secret family history. Oscar, a handsome young man with almost no memories at all, travels the world in a constant state of fear.

Into these characters’ lives comes Noor, a psychologist working at the Nepenthe memory removal clinic in London. The process of reinstating patients’ memories begins to shake the moral foundations of her world. As she delves deeper into how the program works, she will have to risk everything to uncover the cost of this miraculous technology.

And a big old dud for me. I was intrigued by the Black Mirror and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comparisons. I was looking for a very strange trip through memory and neuroscience (with a dash of the sci-fi thrown in). Unfortunately, we get a book of terrible people speculating about the terrible things they may or may not have done. The pace was excruciating. Nothing happened for chapters and chapters and chapters. And then when things happened, they weren’t that exciting. I was just thoroughly bored and definitely did not like this book.

Next up on the TBR pile: