Best Book of 2025 by Electric Literature, PEN America, Debutiful - Top First Novel of 2025 by Booklist - Spotify Editors' Pick - Longlisted for the Goodreads Choice Award in Science Fiction
"Ma's These Memories Do Not Belong to Us brilliantly inventive weaves worlds around a central question: What happens when technology enables a totalitarian government to break into the last private frontiers of the internal mind? Chilling, poignant, and uncomfortably timely, Ma's braided memory dispatches explore a future in which the shifting concepts of safety, loyalty, and truth lead nowhere except condemnation." -- Tessa Hulls, author of Pulitzer Prize-winner Feeding Ghosts
For fans of Cloud Atlas and The Power, a hauntingly beautiful and prescient debut set in a future where a renamed China is the sole global superpower.
When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me stories of a world before memories could be shared between strangers...
In a far-off future ruled by the Qin Empire, every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank, an intracranial device capable of recording and transmitting memories between minds. This technology gives birth to Memory Capitalism, where anyone with means can relive the life experiences of others. It also unleashes opportunities for manipulation: memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain.
After the sudden passing of his mother, an unnamed narrator inherits a collection of banned memories from her Mindbank so dangerous that even possessing them places his freedom in jeopardy. Traversing genres, empires, and millennia, they are tales of sumo wrestlers and social activists and armless swimmers and watchmakers, struggling amid the backdrop of Qin's ascent toward global dominance. Determined to release his mother's memories to the world before they are destroyed forever, the narrator will risk everything--even if the cost is his own life.
Powerful and provocative, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us masterfully explores how governments and media manipulate history to control the collective imagination. It forces us to see beyond the sheen of convenient truths and to unearth real stories of sacrifice and love that refuse to be eradicated.
About the Author :
Born in Shanghai, Yiming Ma spent a decade in the tech and finance world across New York, Toronto, London, Berlin and South Africa before writing the dystopian novel THESE MEMORIES DO NOT BELONG TO US, set in a world where memories are bought and sold. He attended Stanford for his MBA and also holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was named the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. His story "Swimmer of Yangtze" won the 2018 Guardian 4th Estate Story Prize. He's a first generation immigrant and despite his travels, he's still figuring out where home is.
Review :
"This may be one of the most important books published this year." -- Winnipeg Free Press
"Ma movingly depicts taboo relationships... and dramatizes how fanatical devotion to the government can lure people to their own destruction." -- Washington Post
"Much like English novelist David Mitchell's speculative fiction classic Cloud Atlas...These Memories Do Not Belong to Us experiments with stories within stories to create an epic sweep of tales across eras... Both in form and substance, his imaginative dystopian novel is a spirited defence of how stories survive in an age of control and suppression." -- Strait Times
"Yiming Ma gorgeously, spectacularly connects prescient stories in an unforgettable vision of a dystopic future desperate for lasting connection." -- Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)
"Mesmerizing. A deeply felt and meticulously crafted novel that entrances the reader from the first sentence to its last."-- Jason Mott, National Book Award-winning author of Hell of a Book
"A slim and powerful speculative novel about what happens when memories are taken from us and given to everyone. Ma is a brilliant mind with a shining voice. His writing is spellbinding, and his plot and characters are innovative and engaging. Reading it was reminiscent of the first time I read Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life. It made me believe that books can change my brain's chemistry." -- Debutiful (Best Book of 2025)
"This isn't just a novel. It's a revolutionary experiment in how our memories and histories can save us. By turns heartbreaking and eerily prescient, Ma's ambitious debut breaks open the hidden parts of us and scatters them across the night sky for you to discover."-- Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark
"A dangerous inheritance upends everything a young man knows in Ma's timely and impressive debut. Readers of literary dystopian fiction will find much to enjoy in this thought-provoking debut." -- Library Journal
"This novel-in-stories, set in a dystopian future in which memories can be downloaded from one mind to another, asks provocative questions about narrative, humanity, and love...The premise of Ma's debut novel provides ample opportunity for both metafictional playfulness and deadly serious commentary on our fraught relationship with technology." --Booklist (Top First Novel of 2025)
"Stunning. A deeply imaginative debut of a near-future dystopia, profoundly humane in its exploration of memory and the stories that make us who we are." -- Vincent Lam, Giller Prize-winning author of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
"Chilling, poignant, and uncomfortably timely, Ma's braided memory dispatches explore a future in which the shifting concepts of safety, loyalty, and truth lead nowhere except condemnation."-- Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Feeding Ghosts
"A chilling dystopian novel in stories... Ma bravely and lucidly portrays how an authoritarian regime seeks to control people's minds, and how people's lives can be commodified by technology. This timely work leaves readers with much to chew on." --Publishers Weekly
"Yiming Ma's gripping, kaleidoscopic debut marries our current anxiety around surveillance, technology, personal data, and geopolitical unrest with a world where stories remain a tool for connection and revolution." -- Lillian Li, author of Number One Chinese Restaurant
"Extraordinary. A melancholic mosaic of lives brilliantly bearing witness to the ways memories shape and reshape individuals, nations, histories, and futures."-- Ai Jiang, Nebula and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Linghun
