Published By: Ad Astra
Pages: 336
Released On: 12/03/2026
In a windswept corner of a forgotten peninsula, love and loss echo through the halls of a mansion built on secrets. Here memory is currency of the future, and the past refuses to stay buried.
In the year 2084, Christian Cartwright, a quiet librarian at the enigmatic Huxley Institute, spends his days archiving the world’s most painful memories in the Library of Traumatic Memory.
But when his lover Isolde dies in a mysterious car crash, Christian secretly resurrects her as a digital consciousness — an act of grief, obsession, and defiance.
As Christian navigates a world where memories can be edited, dreams harvested, and the dead made to speak, he uncovers a deeper conspiracy buried in the Institute’s foundations — one that stretches back centuries to his 18th-century ancestor Montagu Cartwright, the architect of the Huxley Mansion.
Montagu’s obsidian mirror and copper model may hold the key to a reality where architecture shapes fate and time loops back on itself.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Ad Astra for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This was a pre-order that fell victim to be financial issues, so I was thrilled I was sent an advanced digital copy, but now having read it I am so glad I did cancel it because it did not live up to my expectations at all.
I never say a book is bad. Because no book is bad. A book might not be my kind of thing, but it might be a five-star read for someone else. Therefore, a book is never a bad book. But this is the closet I’ve come to declaring a book bad.
The description made me think it was going to be this extra long epic that you struggle to pick up, so it was surprising to see it was under 350 pages, and I think that was one of the causes for me not liking it, because it was streamlined too much.
This is the first of Neil’s books I’ve read, and I have also seen none of his movies, so I went into this 100% blind and had no expectations at all.
Nothing actually happens. It’s just a load of words and sentences that don’t really mean anything; they’re all bitty and inconsequential.
The dialogue gets lost because there’s no speech marks, and I absolutely hate it when authors do no speech marks. In my opinion, it’s not an exciting, clever narrative tool, it’s jarring and distracting.
I didn’t understand much of it. It’s rather highbrow and also very sci-fi-ish, and that combination meant some of the language passed me by.
It is a very narrative heavy book with little dialogue. We almost get Christian’s inner monologue, although it is not in the first person. The sentence lengths keep changing, with an awful lot of short, snappy sentences that break the flow of the reading and I just cannot think why he’s chosen that writing style.
It is mostly set in the present (although the “present” in this book is in the 2080s), but it also flashes back 200 years previous. But it doesn’t always make it clear, like, it doesn’t say at the top of each chapter what year we’re in, and so I would be halfway through a chapter before I realised who it is I’m reading about, which didn’t help my enjoyment of it.
One positive is the chapters were short – some only a page or two – and I prefer short, snappy chapters rather than long winding ones.
This had so much promise and I was so keen to read it, but it was such a disappointment. It’s too busy and it needs to be longer. The short page count meant there is a lot of narrative in a short amount of time and so it got overwhelming and confusing. The writing style was odd, the to-ing and fro-ing through time periods was also confusing, even though I normally enjoy that, the characters were okay but I didn’t feel anything towards them. A big disappointment for me sadly.
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