In this staggeringly mind-bending speculative thriller for fans of Blake Crouch and Ted Chiang, a woman dives into her husband’s memories to uncover a decades-old threat to reality itself…

Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for her elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It’s the loneliest she’s ever felt in her life.

When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth: Stanley isn’t losing his memories. Someone is actively removing them to hide a long-buried secret from coming to light. If Maggie does what she’s told, she can reverse it. She can get her husband back.

Led by Hassan and his technological marvels, Maggie breaks into her husband’s mind, probing the depths of his memories in an effort to save him. The deeper she dives, the more she unravels a mystery spanning continents and centuries, each layer more complex than the last.

But Hassan cannot be trusted. Not just memories are disappearing, but pieces of reality itself. If Maggie cannot find out what Stanley did all those years ago, and what Hassan is after, she risks far more than her husband’s life. The very course of human history hangs in the balance.

Dissolution is due for publication 27th March. You can pre-order your copy HERE

Dissolution: Why Memory is a Shaky Foundation for Reality

by Nicholas Binge

Over the past decade, as I’ve watched two of my grandparents (on different sides of the family) succumb to dementia and memory loss, two sides of the affliction stood out to me. The first was seeing the way my Gran didn’t just lose her memories, but her entire identity. It was less that she couldn’t recognise her family, but more that she no longer exhibited the traits and behaviours that made her uniquely her. That terrified me — that your identity could be scooped out of your body in that way? It’s haunted me ever since. 

The second pivotal moment came with my Grannie, on the other side of my family, and its impact on my Grandpa. They’d been in one of the most loving and devoted marriages you could imagine for so many decades, been each other’s everything across continents and generations, and my Grannie’s dementia tore through that. Again, it wasn’t that she didn’t always recognise us or him. He no longer recognised her. She was no longer the woman he married, and yet, somewhere in there, was the constant and persistent hope that she still could be. As a man in his mid-nineties, caring for her physically broke him, yet someone else taking over was never an option. He was duty-bound to a partner he no longer really knew, living in a mixture of hope that she might sometimes return, and of guilt that he couldn’t do more to help her. It left me with so many feelings I wanted to explore about the human capacity for love in the face of tragedy, and how we can salvage hope in situations that feel inevitable. And for me, as its been for a long time now, my only way of doing that is through fiction. 

These experiences, of course, are not isolated or rare. My biggest revelation when talking with people about my new book is the sheer number of people who care for family members with dementia, and how universal the pain and suffering it brings. When writing, I did a deep dive into the concept of memory, reading everything from academic studies about memory formation to personal accounts of various forms of memory loss, and even, on the other end of the scale, case studies about extreme ‘memory athletes’ who push themselves to learn thousands of digits of Pi. 

What I learnt is that the very nature of memory is contradictory. It’s inherently unreliable: we construct and reconstruct it all the time, and our memories of events shift and change depending on how we feel when we remember them, and how they fit in with the narratives of our lives. And yet, we rely almost entirely on memories to construct our identities and realities. Sure — we have Wikipedia and textbooks for cold hard facts — but when it comes to our day-to-day, the important stuff like our relationships, our sense of self, our hopes, dreams, regrets… it’s all memory. This is our reality, and it’s built upon smoke. 

This led me to the central technological conceit of the novel: if you could see someone else’s memories of events rather than your own, what would that do to your identity? What would that do to your reality? And if we could all do it, what would that do to reality as a whole? I could talk here about superposition, or the ways in which observation leads to definition, and how I think our memories not only recall but literally shape the past, but while that’s the ‘sci-fi’ dressing of the narrative, the core idea of the book is an emotional one. Think back to my Grandpa no longer recognising his wife of over seventy years. What if he could get inside her head? Would he find the woman he was looking for, or would he, unknowingly, find something else?

This leads us then to Maggie, the eighty-three-year-old protagonist of my novel. Her husband has Alzheimer’s, and though she feels duty-bound to care for him, it’s the loneliest she’s ever been in her life. Then someone shows up at her door and tells her that he isn’t losing his memories, someone is stealing them to hide a long-buried secret. If she does what he says, she can reverse it. She can have him back. What happens after that speaks to my penchant for horror, thrillers, and the irrepressibly weird. Expect to be surprised, expect to be shocked, expect to be a little horrified as the conspiracy that opens up takes us across the globe and swallows centuries. But beneath all of this, expect a love story that is ultimately about hope and holding on. I wanted to ask: what do you do when the person you love most in the world forgets you and forgets themselves? How do you salvage the important memories, even as you watch them dissolving in front of you?

Dissolution is due for publication 27th March. You can pre-order your copy HERE

Nicholas Binge was born in Singapore and has since lived in Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the UK. He is an author of speculative fiction and his recent novel Professor Everywhere was shortlisted for the Proverse Prize for Literature in Hong Kong. He has a deep love for anything weird, anything that pushes boundaries, and anything that makes him cry.

He lives and works in Edinburgh with his family, where he also teaches literature.