Neil Jordan
Head of Zeus
12 March 2026
336
eBook - PDF
Sci-Fi-Fantasy
ARC via NetGalley
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.
Blending gothic mystery, speculative science, and philosophical depth, The Library of Traumatic Memory is a haunting meditation on love, loss, and the ethics of memory.
The Library of Traumatic Memory was an ambitious tale that delivered in some respects but not in others. The tale was a literary-sci-fi fusion that encompassed many themes -- perhaps too many given the short page count. We had a dual narrative between the (future) present and the past. That worked well enough initially, but after the midpoint the (future) present narration rather overtook the past one and I felt that I had a good grasp of what was happening in Christian's narration while Montagu's left me confused. When the book ended, I felt like I knew what had taken place on some levels, but on others I remained confuddled, wondering what I'd just read and what had actually happened, particularly in terms of what tied the past to the (future) present. The lack of punctuation on speech works in some texts, but here it made the prose a bit bewildering at times. I did like the short chapters, though, as that makes it easier for nighttime readers like me to say 'one more chapter before bed'. I think this book could have been presented with a little more clarity in terms of the plot, but it was, nonetheless, an intriguing read that captured my interest, so I am going to give it 3.5 stars.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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