Border Memories

Why live one life, when you could live a thousand? Sol works for a San Diego start-up that traffics in the underground memory trade - harvesting cherished memories from donors in Mexico and implanting them in Americans. Sol's newest client is Mr. Bray - old, rich, well-connected, blind.

Review :
Mr. Bray has heard rumours of a mysterious graveyard in Tijuana where miracles are said to occur. He has tracked down a young librarian who knows the graveyard - Nora Rincón - but its location is buried in a childhood memory. Sol's task is simple - find Nora, build rapport, extract her memory. His reward: $100,000. But when Sol befriends Nora, he begins to understand who Mr. Bray is, what he wants, and what he is capable of - and realizes it might be too late to go back on their agreement... ‘Written with elegant restraint and a raptor’s eye for the small details, Matthews is less interested in whether memories make us who we are, than who we become once memories are ours to give away.’ Glen James Brown, author of Ironopolis ‘As genuine art should, Border Memories explores important and ongoing problems and confidently reimagines them for a new audience.’ Margarita Pintado, author of Una muchacha que se parece a mí Border Memories is a deeply engaging debut novel by Edward Matthews, set in the liminal space of the US/Mexico border, resonant with echoes of the past – echoes that Mr Bray (old, blind, and richer than Croesus) is desperate to recapture at any price. Luckily for him, Jordan Andrews has created a piece of software that harvests other people’s memories for download and integration. As the sales pitch puts it, ‘Why live one life, when you could live a thousand?’ When Jordan’s own life comes to a premature end, it’s up to his brother, Solomon, to pick up the pieces. His next job is to help Mr Bray find the graveyard of miracles, but it’s not going to be easy. There’s no map to follow, only hazy memories held in the head of Nora Rincón, a young librarian from over the border. But she cannot know his true intentions. Sol’s going to have to work this case undercover, and that means making real human contact – not his strongest suit. Not by a long shot. At heart, Border Memories is a story about broken people finding ways to make each other whole. It can also be read as a meditation on identity and personal history, filtered through the hazy lens of human perception. After all, if we are shaped by our experiences, what do we become when those experiences are tradeable commodities? And in such a world, how much of our pasts can we trust? This may sound complicated and weird, but the book is a pretty brisk and breezy read, punctuated with moments of grief. Genre-wise, think of it as a light private-detective sponge cake filled with creamy literary sensibilities and topped with a delicious dusting of science fiction. The world-building is slight, sketched in rather than painstakingly constructed, but that’s no bad thing given that it’s set in the near future. The only appreciable differences between this dystopian future and the Earth of today are the new-born technology of memory curation and the prevalence of driverless cars. What matters most to Matthews is the opportunity presented by this technology to tell his story and showcase his characters. And I loved those characters. Sol is something of a puzzle: forensically observant, quick thinking, yet socially awkward in almost every respect. I don’t know if Matthews intended to write him as an autistic character, but he exhibits many traits familiar to neurodiverse people. By contrast, Nora is vibrant, chatty, physically and emotionally expressive, and a hell of a lot of fun to be around. The awkwardness of this odd couple as they grow to appreciate and understand one another is as funny as it is endearing, though it does dominate the book, pushing the intriguing possibilities of memory curation to the side, somewhat. Bray – our barely-hidden villain – is just as callous, manipulative, arrogant and charming as one might hope for without ever tipping into excess, while Nora’s brother Gabe provides a heart and moral centre around which his sister and Sol do their little dance. I shan’t say anything further, save to recommend that you read this book in the near future. You’ll find yourself swallowed whole by Matthews’s vivid snapshots of life on the border, his fascinating core concept, and his sparse, elegantly written prose. How do I know? You loved it last time. Don’t you remember?