Secondly, we follow Helena, a brilliant neuroscientist driven by her mum's encroaching dementia to find a way to preserve memories.

The book's opening chapters include a powerful scene of him trying to talk down a female sufferer from throwing herself off a building and his subsequent adventures lead him deeper into the mystery. Firstly, Barry, a New York cop who becomes intrigued by a strange syndrome which seems to inject false memories of alternate lives into people's minds. There have been lots of books involving multiple, alternate realities but to my mind, this one has a freshness of approach that works particularly well. 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.at the risk of destroying what it means to be human.īlake Crouch once again returns to similar themes to Dark Matter, he seems to be indulging in recursion himself but this time he really has probably nailed it. 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 breathtaking 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.

Blake recursion