Meanwhile, Barry grapples with the effects of a newly-arisen and woefully misunderstood disease called False Memory Syndrome, which causes people to suddenly remember entire lifetimes they never actually lived, like something from a dream, but recalled as vividly as reality.Ĭasual readers will no doubt figure out the two narratives are connected in some way, but just how they're connected will surprise even seasoned fans of genre fiction. She's ultimately approached by a shadowy entity offering a too-good-to-be-true deal: unlimited funding for Helena's invention, if she agrees to cloister herself on an offshore oil rig-turned research lab. The narrative splits its time between Barry Sutton, an alcoholic New York City detective still reeling from the death of his teenage daughter a decade prior, and Helena Smith, a scientific genius obsessed with constructing a device that can essentially record memories-a DVR for the mind-in the hopes of preserving what is left of her dementia-stricken mother's brain. I loved this novel, but Crouch has outdone himself with Recursion. Author of fourteen books to date, including the Wayward Pines trilogy, which became the basis for the Fox television series of the same name, Crouch first came to my attention with his 2016 novel Dark Matter (read the LitReactor review here). But Blake Crouch's action-packed, brilliantly unique Recursion had me up late and shirking responsibilities until I had devoured the last page.Blake Crouch seems to have mastered the art of blending complex science fiction, mystery, human drama, and psychological horror with his latest novel Recursion, available now from Penguin Random House. 'It's not often I plough through a book in two days. at the risk of destroying what it means to be human. 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.īarry's search for the truth leads him on an impossible, astonishing journey, as he discovers that Helena's work has yielded a terrifying gift - the ability not just to preserve memories, but to remake them.

Miles away, neuroscientist Helena Smith is developing a technology that allows us to preserve our most intense memories, and relive them. Are they suffering from False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious, new disease that afflicts people with vivid memories of a life they never lived? Or is something far more sinister behind the fracturing of reality all around him?

All across the country, people are waking up to lives different than the ones they fell asleep to. Deeply unnerved, Barry begins to investigate her death, only to learn that this wasn't an isolated case. Those are the last words the woman tells Barry Sutton, before she leaps from the Manhattan rooftop. What if someone could rewrite your entire life? A breath-taking exploration of memory and what it means to be human, Recursion is the follow-up novel to the smash-hit thriller, Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch.

Recursion blake