Recursion

My son has been erased. Those are the last words the woman tells Barry Sutton, before she leaps from the Manhattan rooftop. Deeply unnerved, Barry begins to investigate her death, only to learn that this wasn't an isolated case. All across the country, people are waking up to lives different from the ones they fell asleep to. Are they suffering from False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious new disease that afflicts people with vivid memories of a life they never lived? Neuroscientist Helena Smith already understands the power of memory. It's why she has dedicated her life to creating a technology that will let us preserve our most precious moments of our pasts. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss, the birth of a child, the final moment with a dying parent. As Barry searches for the truth, he comes face-to-face with an opponent more terrifying than any disease -- a force that attacks not just our minds but the very fabric of the past. And as its effects begin to unmake the world as we know it, only he and Helena, working together, will stand a chance at defeating it. But how can they make a stand when reality itself is shifting and crumbling all around them?

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake)	SCD FICTION CRO 9 DISCS	Searching... Unknown
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Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the bestselling author of Dark Matter and the Wayward Pines trilogy comes a relentless thriller about time, identity, and memory--his most mind-boggling, irresistible work to date, and the inspiration for Shondaland's upcoming Netflix film.

"Gloriously twisting . . . a heady campfire tale of a novel."-- The New York Times Book Review

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME

Reality is broken.

At first, it looks like a disease. An epidemic that spreads through no known means, driving its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. But the force that's sweeping the world is no pathogen. It's just the first shock wave, unleashed by a stunning discovery--and what's in jeopardy is not our minds but the very fabric of time itself.

In New York City, Detective Barry Sutton is closing in on the truth--and in a remote laboratory, neuroscientist Helena Smith is unaware that she alone holds the key to this mystery . . . and the tools for fighting back.

Together, Barry and Helena will have to confront their enemy--before they, and the world, are trapped in a loop of ever-growing chaos.

Praise for Recursion

"An action-packed, brilliantly unique ride that had me up late and shirking responsibilities until I had devoured the last page . . . a fantastic read." --Andy Weir, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Martian

"Another profound science-fiction thriller. Crouch masterfully blends science and intrigue into the experience of what it means to be deeply human." -- Newsweek

"Definitely not one to forget when you're packing for vacation . . . Crouch] breathes fresh life into matters with a mix of heart, intelligence, and philosophical musings." -- Entertainment Weekly

"A trippy journey down memory lane . . . Crouch's] intelligence is an able match for the challenge he's set of overcoming the structure of time itself." -- Time

"Wildly entertaining . . . another winning novel from an author at the top of his game." -- AV Club

Author Notes

Blake Crouch is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the novel, Dark Matter, for which he is writing the screenplay for Sony Pictures. His bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy was adapted into a television series for FOX in 2015. With Chad Hodge, Crouch also created Good Behavior, the TNT television show starring Michelle Dockery based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. He has written more than a dozen novels that have been translated into over thirty languages and his short fiction has appeared in several publications including Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

New York Review of Books Review

lately, I've traveled through the wormhole of paranormal podcasts, ones that focus on the impossible and uncanny. Some of the best include "Astonishing Legends," "Mysterious Universe" and "MonsterTalk." The granddaddy of such podcasts is "Coast to Coast AM." On these fine shows I've learned about the Bell Witch, an entity that terrorized a family in Tennessee in the 1800s; Disappearing Object Phenomenon, which explains why common objects tend to go missing in one's home; and, of course, the "Nazi Werewolf Organization." I'm sure there are listeners, probably many, who believe everything described in these podcasts, and some who claim to have experienced them. I don't and I haven't. I'm a skeptic, though not quite an unbeliever - yet that doesn't diminish my enjoyment of these shows. They often have the feel of friends sitting at a bar, or gathered around a campfire, trading spooky stories to pass the time. That's the fun of it, really: You think that was wild, listen to this! All of which is to say I was in the perfect state of mind to pick up Blake Crouch's "Recursion," a heady campfire tale of a novel built for summer reading. There are two central characters: Barry Sutton, an N.Y.P.D. detective, and Helena Smith, a neuroscientist in Palo Alto who studies memory. The book opens with Barry being called to the Upper West Side to help a woman threatening suicide at the Poe Building. The woman, Ann, suffers from a condition called false memory syndrome in which people think that they are living the wrong life, that another timeline of existence has been overwritten in order for them to live a new one. Think of it as erasing a drawing on a sheet of paper and starting a new one on the same sheet: The trace of the old image remains; you can't unsee it. The discrepancy between the two drives sufferers mad, turns them suicidal. Ann is a single investment banker, but she also remembers being a married woman who ran a landscaping business in Vermont; the couple had a 9-year-old son, Sam; she's sure of it. But none of that ever happened. They're all false memories. So why does she clearly recall Sam's laugh, the birthmark on his left cheek, his first day of school? She jumps to her death because she can't live with the loss of that phantom child. Barry, witnessing her leap, wonders if Sam really was a false memory, or if something else is going on. Cut to Helena, in her lab more than a decade earlier, in 2007, "examining the image of a mouse's memory of being afraid - fluorescently illuminated neurons interconnected by a spider web of synapses." Because her mother suffers from severe memory loss, Helena's goal is to invent a special chair that will save Mom and, by extension, so many others from this fate. The invention itself seems dauntingly faroff, though, "light-years away." In short, she doesn't have any funding, the eternal scientific hurdle. But then a stranger appears in her office. He knows all about her chair and why no other entities are ever going to fund it. "Because what you really want is bank-breaking. You don't need seven figures. You need nine. Maybe 10. You need a team of coders to help you design an algorithm for complex memory cataloging and projection. The infrastructure for human trials." This man works for someone who will give her exactly that - all the money and support in the world. Helena is hooked. Some of the novel's most rewarding tension is created as the reader anticipates how Helena's invention will lead to Barry and Ann at the Poe Building. Barry's and Helena's stories do eventually collide, but the journey is a gloriously twisting line that regularly confounded my expectations. I'm loath to say much about where this novel ends up, but suffice to say the memory chair will be built and used - and that false memory syndrome ends up being the tamest of its side effects. There's a faint political undercurrent to the novel. False memory syndrome is first reported in 2016. A character on CNN says: "If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that?" Maybe, finally, this is why I love those paranormal podcasts, and why I enjoyed "Recursion" so much. Those shows are often dismissed as fringe programming, and novels like this one damned as frivolous entertainment, but I believe they capture the disquiet of millions; they broadcast at an anxious frequency. The sense that our country's center is not holding pulses through the novel. The fear that we are losing our collective memory, of a stable nation for instance, doesn't read to me like fantasy. VICTOR lavalle'S latest novel is "The Changeling."

Library Journal Review

NYPD officer Barry Sutton is called to the roof of a Manhattan high rise where a woman is threatening to jump. As he tries to talk her down, she tells him a story about something called False Memory Syndrome. Thus begins one of the wildest novels of the year and one that will challenge listeners to the very end. Thousands of miles away from New York, scientist Helena Smith is working for an Elon Musk-style gazillionaire who gives Helena the chance to complete her lifelong dream, setting into motion the worst events the world has ever seen. Readers Jon Lindstrom and Abby Craden do a wonderful job narrating the Armageddon-like chaos that follows, and they do their best to make a highly complex story understandable to listeners. VERDICT An excellent choice for all audiobook collections.--Joseph Carlson, Vandenberg Air Force Base Lib., Lompoc, CA

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Summary

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Reviews (2)

New York Review of Books Review

Library Journal Review

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