“He should have got therapy, Noor…It wasn’t binary. It wasn’t death or deletion. I can see him now, making his decision between honour and disgrace.“
Tell Me an Ending, a debut novel by Jo Harkin, is a sci-if almost dystopian book that would be perfect for fans of Black Mirror. It came out on the 1st of March and was published by Scribner.
We’ve all wondered what it would be like if we could just delete a memory. If we could erase our trauma just like that. But don’t our memories make us who we are? Doesn’t the body also remember? Can it really be that easy?
Tell Me an Ending follows the stories of different people, whose lives overlap, who have all been impacted by the erasure of memories. Noor works at the clinic, Mei’s mother is important in the company, Oscar was one of its earliest patients, William had an illegal procedure, Finn was afraid that his wife had an affair and so on.
Jo Harkin does a fantastic job of exploring the consequences that this could have on a person, and people around them. It’s made more intriguing when people find out that memories can’t just be blacked out like that, and can be restored. The changing perspectives kept things going in what could have been a really slow book. This was definitely a great debut novel and I can’t wait to see more of Jo Harkin!