The Memory Addicts

<p>Without memory how might a society survive? </p><p><br></p><p>In Derek Kannemeyer's novel a memory loss pandemic turns the world's billions into cataleptic husks. One person in twenty is immune others hang on wildly medicated-but can a civilization so brutally diminished recover?</p><p><br></p><p>Before the pandemic hits Jody and Millar work at a Virginia medical research facility. A memory drug has run into problems. It sparks amazing restorations but it also implants false memories. When Jody for her own desperate reasons steals a batch she secures Millar's help. A dozen people close to them are pulled in; the drug becomes their only hope to jury-rig a half-reliable identity.</p><p><br></p><p><em>The Memory Addicts</em> is a love story and a plague story but it's primarily the portrait of friends navigating a world in peril. Millar and Jody's tale remains pivotal. It is star-crossed like all their stories yet incredibly collectively most of their group has survived. And now on this one climactic day four years on it all threatens to </p><p>come apart.</p><p><br></p><p>At issue are the ways in which our dependence on memory shapes and shackles us. And the fragility of the stories that we live by and that we leave behind us. </p>