Memory and Straw

Gavin and Emma live in Manhattan. She’s a musician. He works in ArtificialIntelligence. He’s good at his job. Scarily good. He’s researching humanfeatures to make more realistic mask-bots – non-human `carers’ for elderlypeople. When his enquiry turns personal he’s forced to ask whether his ownlife is an artificial mask.A novel about the struggle for freedom and personal identity; what it meansto be human. It fuses the glass and steel of our increasingly controlledalgorithmic world with the memory and straw of our forebears’ worldcontrolled by traditions and taboos, the seasons and the elements.

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, thevividness of the fragments that inexplicably linger in technicolour, and our own, never-outgrown, absurdity. It's about land and water andfairies; the marvellous and the unavoidable, and what we finally, with due modesty, grasp as essential. An irrepressible, quite remarkable,joy. – JANICE GALLOWAY