OUR MEMORY LIKE DUST

Future shock

released 27 JUlY

394 pages | Hardback/ebook

Author Gavin Chait

Publisher doubleday

sometimes a book feels uncannily in tune with the time it was written. In the afterword to his second novel, Our Memory Like Dust, Gavin Chait expresses surprise at how much of what he was writing about speculatively was being played out for real in the news: refugee crises, the collapse of the EU, the resurgence of the far right… That’s ironic, given that this is a novel that’s, at least partially, about the way stories influence reality and vice versa.

Our Memory Like Dust is set in a future that’s both recognisable and bleak AF. This is a post-climate change world where London is partially flooded, global jihadism

There’s a thread of the fantastical throughout

is rife and millions have been displaced with devastating effect. In one harrowing scene a group of survivors fleeing terror in Libya make it to safety… only to be immediately sent back to their deaths. One of the lucky few to escape is Shakiso, who recklessly throws herself back into the field by allying herself with a mysterious businessman, Simon.

So far, so typically grim near-future SF. But Dust isn’t just a dark extrapolation of our present. It’s also a book about the power of folk myths, and there’s a thread of the fantastical woven throughout. Characters experience visions of mystical baboons, stories are recited, and there’s a sense that the world of the imminent is only a hair’s breadth from our own.

If the book’s characterisation is a little weak – you get a decent handle on Shakiso, not so much anyone else – it makes up for it with breathless pace. At once dreamlike and harrowingly believable, this is not a comforting read. It is, however, a gripping and frightening one.

Ansar Dine, the terrorist organisation in the book, is real; they came to prominence in 2012 when they captured Timbuktu.