57. The Book of M by Peng Shepherd

listened on Audible
20158 William M0rrow
426 pgs.  (17:06)
Adult Dystopian Mystery
Finished 6/27/18
Goodreads rating:  4.11 - 503 ratings
My rating:  3
Setting:  Dystopian Washington DC to New Orleans, LA (with a short foray to India)

First line/s:  "The end of Ory's world began with a deer."

My comments:  This was a long, endless, DEPRESSING story told from the point of view of four different people.  For quite a while I couldn't help but compare it to The Fifth Wave, with shades of Station Eleven, until it went in its own direction.  So depressing, it's going to take me awhile to climb back out of the hole it put me into.  I did work well as an audio book.

Goodreads synopsis: Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
          One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
          Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.
          Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
          As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.