"This may be one of the most important books published this year." -- Winnipeg Free Press "Ma movingly depicts taboo relationships. and dramatizes how fanatical devotion to the government can lure people to their own destruction." -- Washington Post "Much like English novelist David Mitchell's speculative fiction classic Cloud Atlas.These Memories Do Not Belong to Us experiments with stories within stories to create an epic sweep of tales across eras. Both in form and substance, his imaginative dystopian novel is a spirited defence of how stories survive in an age of control and suppression." -- Strait Times "Yiming Ma gorgeously, spectacularly connects prescient stories in an unforgettable vision of a dystopic future desperate for lasting connection." -- Shelf Awareness (Starred Review) "Mesmerizing.
A deeply felt and meticulously crafted novel that entrances the reader from the first sentence to its last." -- Jason Mott, National Book Award-winning author of Hell of a Book "A slim and powerful speculative novel about what happens when memories are taken from us and given to everyone. Ma is a brilliant mind with a shining voice. His writing is spellbinding, and his plot and characters are innovative and engaging. Reading it was reminiscent of the first time I read Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life. It made me believe that books can change my brain's chemistry." -- Debutiful (Best Book of 2025) "This isn't just a novel. It's a revolutionary experiment in how our memories and histories can save us.
By turns heartbreaking and eerily prescient, Ma's ambitious debut breaks open the hidden parts of us and scatters them across the night sky for you to discover." -- Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark "A dangerous inheritance upends everything a young man knows in Ma's timely and impressive debut. Readers of literary dystopian fiction will find much to enjoy in this thought-provoking debut." -- Library Journal "This novel-in-stories, set in a dystopian future in which memories can be downloaded from one mind to another, asks provocative questions about narrative, humanity, and love.The premise of Ma's debut novel provides ample opportunity for both metafictional playfulness and deadly serious commentary on our fraught relationship with technology." -- Booklist (Top First Novel of 2025) "Stunning. A deeply imaginative debut of a near-future dystopia, profoundly humane in its exploration of memory and the stories that make us who we are." -- Vincent Lam, Giller Prize-winning author of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures "Chilling, poignant, and uncomfortably timely, Ma's braided memory dispatches explore a future in which the shifting concepts of safety, loyalty, and truth lead nowhere except condemnation.
" -- Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Feeding Ghosts "A chilling dystopian novel in stories. Ma bravely and lucidly portrays how an authoritarian regime seeks to control people's minds, and how people's lives can be commodified by technology. This timely work leaves readers with much to chew on." -- Publishers Weekly "Yiming Ma's gripping, kaleidoscopic debut marries our current anxiety around surveillance, technology, personal data, and geopolitical unrest with a world where stories remain a tool for connection and revolution." -- Lillian Li, author of Number One Chinese Restaurant "Extraordinary. A melancholic mosaic of lives brilliantly bearing witness to the ways memories shape and reshape individuals, nations, histories, and futures." -- Ai Jiang, Nebula and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Linghun.