Mem is a rare book, a small publication carrying very big concepts, the type of story that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it.

Occur the glittering artwork deco world of a century ago, Mem makes one slight alteration to history: a scientist in Montreal discovers a method allowing visitors to possess their memories extracted using their minds, whole and complete. The Mems exist as mirror-images of their supply―zombie-like animals destined to experience that singular memory again and again, about Mem: A Novel until they expire in the cavernous Vault where they may be kept.

And then there is certainly Dolores Remove #1, the first Mem with the capacity of creating her own memories. An ageless beauty shrouded in mystery, she is permitted to go on her personal, and create her personal existence, until 1 day she is summoned back to the Vault. What goes on next can be a gorgeously rendered, heart-breaking novel in the vein of Kazuo Ishiguro’s By no means Let Me Proceed.

Debut novelist Bethany Morrow has generated an allegory for our very own time, exploring profound questions of ownership and how they relate to identity, memory, and history, all in the shadows of Montreal’s now forgotten slave trade.