Tell Me an Ending

October 1, 2021

A psychologist at a London clinic that removes all those bad memories we don't want, Noor is worried. She has encountered several people--from Finn, who suspects his wife of infidelity, to Mei, puzzled that she recalls a city she has never visited, to Oscar, equally puzzled that he can't recall much at all--whose memories seem to have been tampered with unduly. Has Louise, the clinic's high-flying boss, gone over the edge? A high-flying debut, too, with a 175,000-copy first printing

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November 1, 2021
This high-concept debut asks an interesting question: What if we could edit our memories? What if we could, say, snip out the memory of a traumatic event that shaped our lives? Would we remain the same people after the procedure? Nepenthe is a company that specializes in memory-removal, but lately the firm has been under a lot of scrutiny. People are claiming they are experiencing "traces," fragments of supposedly deleted memories that haven't been wiped clean. The novel follows five characters: Mei, a woman who has vivid mental images of a place she doesn't remember visiting; Oscar, whose past is a mystery to him; William, an ex-cop with a past he doesn't recognize; Finn, an architect who isn't sure what to believe about his marriage; and Noor, a Nepenthe psychologist who has come to believe that her boss may be committing serious crimes. As the focus shifts from one character to another, Harkin builds a picture of a world radically altered by a controversial technology and of people who are learning that you can't change the past without impacting the present. An intellectually and emotionally satisfying thriller.

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January 3, 2022
Harkin wrestles with the ethics of choosing to forget one’s past in this richly imagined debut. In an alternate present, medical company Nepenthe has been providing memory deletion services for the past 20 years. Clients classified as “self-informed” are still aware they had a procedure to wipe a recent memory. Those who are “self-confidential” chose to forget they’ve had the erasure. A class action lawsuit filed by clients plagued by trace memories spurs the company to inform all self-confidentials of their deletion and offer memory restorations. Harkin tells the story from the points of view of a psychologist working for Nepenthe, a college dropout struggling with trace memories, an architect who discovers that his wife was a self-confidential, a young man inexplicably missing years of memories, and a former policeman seeking a memory deletion despite his estranged wife’s concerns. The author does a good job imagining the effects of Nepenthe’s work while characters weigh questions such as whether or not the self is inherently altered by memory loss. Some arcs feel more emotionally fleshed out than others, but Harkin keeps the plot tight and times her reveals effectively. It adds up to a smart speculative outing. Agent: Felicity Blunt, Curtis Brown.

February 1, 2022
Five people are impacted by their connections to a memory-removal clinic in this debut novel. In an alternate near present, a tech company called Nepenthe offers a memory erasure procedure straight out of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Nepenthe patients can elect whether to remain aware they had a memory erased or to forget it ever happened. When new research suggests memories might not be permanently erasable--that they may naturally regenerate--the phenomenon of memory "traces" rollicks Nepenthe with controversy, prompting the company to offer memory restorations. Noor, a doctor at the flagship Nepenthe clinic outside London, begins to mistrust her supervisor, Louise, after observing some shady behavior regarding restorations. The narrative follows four additional characters, each from a close third-person perspective: Mei, a young woman in Kuala Lumpur who believes she is experiencing traces; Finn, an architect in Arizona who suspects his wife erased the memory of an extramarital affair; Oscar, a man in Marrakech who barely has any memory of who he is; and William, an ex-cop in West Sussex who wants to remove a memory that is causing him PTSD. The premise is intriguing and becomes more compelling as it progresses (particularly pertaining to Louise's psychology), but the story takes a while to pick up steam. The present-tense narration drifts around in time, heavy on abstract questions and light on descriptive scenes, making it tough to stay grounded in the action. Harkin frequently describes each characters' confusion--"Louise, what have you done? / Why did you do it? / What's next?" asks Noor, on three separate lines--but struggles to differentiate their voices in other meaningful ways. References to philosophers like Sartre, Hume, and Locke aim for cleverness and depth, hitting the mark as often as not. Interconnected storylines all arrive at the same conclusion: Messing with memory is messy business.

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