Memory and Straw

Sebastian and Emma live in Manhattan. She’s a musician and he works in Artificial Intelligence, researching human features to make his company’s mask-bots more realistic. But his enquiry turns personal, and he is forced to ask whether his own life is an artificial mask. Delving into family stories and his roots in the Highlands of Scotland, he embarks on a quest to discover his own true face, ‘uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been’. He travels. Reads old documents. Visits ruins. Borrows, plagarises and invents. But when Emma tells him his proper work is to make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw, what path will he choose? A novel that takes us from Wall Street to the Scottish Highlands, via Martha’s Vineyard and Oxford, to the final denouement in Rome.

Reviews of Memory and Straw

This novel is about living, nothing less. A glorious adventure in voices, it sifts through memory and randomness, what we retain and do not, the vividness of the fragments that inexplicably linger in technicolour, and our own, never-outgrown, absurdity. It's about land and water and fairies; the marvellous and the unavoidable, and what we fi nally, with due modesty, grasp as essential. An irrepressible, quite remarkable, joy – JANICE GALLOWAY