Title: Book of M

Author: Peng Shepherd

Publisher: William Morrow 2018

Genre: Speculative Fiction

Pages: 489

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Unread Shelf; 52 Book Club - Told in Non-chronological Order

Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.

Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.

Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.

As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

After reading Shepherd’s later book, The Cartographers, I wasn’t sure that I would like this one. But a ton of people thought I might, and they were right. This is a very thought provoking and moody tale. It reminds me of The Road and The Walking Dead but without the absolute bleakness of those stories. The story starts out pretty straight forward, but becomes weirder and weirder as we go along. At some point, the reader just has to accept the weirdness and keep moving forward. Many aspects of the shadowless are not explained, but that’s not really the point here. The point is an examination of how memories make us, how memories create our identities and allow us to live in the world. I found myself wondering about all the things that make up me. A much more thought provoking book than her later works.

Next up on the TBR pile: