A novel by Navjot Sharma
In a future where grief is illegal, memory is medicine—and forgetting is the cure.
Mara Lin is a memory integrity worker in Olyra, a sterile city where sorrow has been eradicated through Replacement Therapy. Painful memories are not healed—they are replaced. People walk around with smiles stitched by science, their grief rewritten by fabricated happiness. Even Mara has undergone the therapy. She should be at peace.
But something inside her remembers what she's not supposed to: a girl named Elsie, a bond too deep to erase, and a love that was never permitted to hurt.
When Mara begins to experience vivid flashes of a memory that shouldn't exist, she’s diagnosed with Excessive Imaginative Disorder—an emotional crime in a city built on detachment. Desperate for answers, she stumbles upon a hidden rebellion—the Recallists—who illegally preserve true memories and fight to reclaim the forgotten.