I can’t imagine a scarier scenario than deep diving and getting lost inside your partner’s memories of 80 years of life. Dissolution is a love story deeply embedded within a mystery within a speculative fiction/sci fi novel. Maggie’s husband Stanley is in assisted living, in the memory care unit. A stranger appears into her life and tells Maggie that Stanley does not have dementia, but his memories are being stolen. She has renewed hope that he can regain his short and long term memory and become “her Stanley” again.
Hassan gives Maggie the chance to go back into Stanley’s memories- to places and time they shared together in 50 years of marriage and with their daughter, Leah. The chapters alternate between Stanley’s past- back to 1955 before he met Maggie. It becomes clear earlier on in the book that Hassan is not all he seems.
This is a fascinating premise that unfolds over time, layers upon layers are revealed… and I missed some. I did have to keep flipping back to understand where I was in the narrative, and to differentiate the true from the false. Although I liked Maggie and believed her love- and Stanley being a true romantic, the characters themselves fell a little flat for me, protagonist and antagonists being tragically exaggerated. I liked this book a lot, but I am not sure I completely understood it. It was exciting and very dark/gruesome in parts.
Memories as time travel is something intriguing to me, and this was certainly a fresh way of thinking about it.
Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin/ Riverhead books for the ARC. Book to be published March 25, 2025.
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