The question this novel keeps returning to is one of possession. Not of objects or property, but of the self: whether the continuity of a person's identity depends on their memory of it, and what it means if that memory is not entirely their own.

Tony lives an ordinary life in a near-future city. When someone breaks into his apartment and deletes a voicemail he never heard, the ground beneath that ordinary life begins to shift. The novel that follows is not an investigation. It is an inhabiting. Tony is not trying to solve what happened to him. He is trying to remain himself while it continues to happen.

The Persistence of Memory holds its central contradiction without resolving it. That refusal is the argument.

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