Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin

Chosen on a whim, having never heard of it, this debut from Jo Harkin was as if someone gave Emily St. John Mandel a John Marrs, speculative fiction plot.

"Sometimes Finn worries that the more he tells a story, the more the original events fade away. Certain elements get left out. Over time they get forgotten entirely—or at least until something stirs them back up again."

Tell Me an Ending delves into the lives of five people who are connected by having been a patient at a memory-removal clinic in an alternate near-present future. The tech company, Nepenthe, has offered this high-end, costly procedure for decades, erasing people's memories. The patients can choose whether they will retain awareness of the procedure or forget the procedure along with the wiped memory. However, when separate ongoing research hints at memory regeneration, controversy engulfs Nepenthe, leading to a demand for more transparency and potential memory restorations.

"Nobody really remembers events accurately. Even in a wider sense, we tell a story of ourselves and edit our memories so they fit that narrative. If the story we decide to tell changes, the memories change. We see memory as creating the self, but the self that's created looks back and changes the memory."

Noor, a young doctor at a Nepenthe branch, becomes suspicious of her supervisor, Louise, and a possibly related chain of events. The narrative explores the perspectives of Mei, Finn, Oscar, and William, each dealing with memory-related issues.

While the premise of dissecting the idea of memory may be obvious, Harkin handles this avenue with care, intelligence, and nuance. She drills down into the very idea of memory — deconstructing it, what it's for, how it functions, and how it can dysfunction. Through her five characters, she explores how strongly our sense of self and identity are linked to the memories we hold. Intertwining these two concepts, she portrays the characters' diverse experiences of their older selves choosing to erase a memory as a means of 'killing' a part of themselves. Exploring the fundamentals of what we can live with remembering and what we'd rather forget over the course of the novel we lose some characters to their memories, we gain some from theirs, and still others chose to go forward with a freedom inside these constraints.

With this being a debut, I'm excited to see what Harkin delivers next. While I was hooked early on with Tell Me an Ending there were some parts that could've been trimmed, as pacing was a bit of a problem just beyond the introduction. However, once past the middle point, the built momentum carried me through to a really wonderfully multi-faceted ending.

Audiobook, as narrated by Tania Rodrigues: Rodrigues was a fantastic narrator, her voice is perfectly suited for the ins and outs of this crosshatched novel. With a multitude of side characters and five central characters, Rodrigues handles the performance deftly — a delightful listen.