Dissolution: A Novel

by Nicholas Binge

Overview

NAMED A BEST THRILLER OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE

“Suspenseful, provocative and surprisingly tender.”—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Cleverly weaves together time travel and memory games into a hard-to-put-down thriller. It’s an expertly crafted puzzle of a story.”—NEW SCIENTIST

A woman dives into her husband's memories to uncover a decades-old feud threatening reality itself in this staggering technothriller from the bestselling author of Ascension

Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It's the loneliest she's ever felt in her life.

When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth: Stanley isn't losing his memories. Someone is actively removing them to hide a long-buried secret from coming to light. If Maggie does what she's told, she can reverse it. She can get her husband back.

Led by Hassan and his technological marvels, Maggie breaks into her husband's mind, probing the depths of his memories in an effort to save him. The deeper she dives, the more she unravels a mystery spanning continents and centuries, each layer more complex than the last. But Hassan cannot be trusted. Not just memories are disappearing, but pieces of reality itself. If Maggie cannot find out what Stanley did all those years ago, and what Hassan is after, she risks far more than her husband's life. The very course of human history hangs in the balance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593852163
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/25/2025
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Binge is the bestselling author of Ascension, a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, which was named one of the best books of the year by Vulture, Goodreads, Entertainment Weekly and more. He lives and teaches in Edinburgh.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Dissolution

"Suspenseful, provocative and surprisingly tender. . . This wild ride of a book [is] both satisfying and deeply moving."—The New York Times

“This twisty, absorbing thriller is both a moving love story and fascinating speculative fiction exploring memory, time and reality.”—The Guardian

“Cleverly weaves together time travel and memory games into a hard-to-put-down thriller. It’s an expertly crafted puzzle of a story.”—New Scientist

"[A] thought-provoking sci-fi thriller. . . .Despite its impressive word-building and science-speak, Dissolution's standout is the love story between Maggie and Stanley. Their love transcends time and memory, remaining the one fact they know to be true. . . .Dissolution. . .expands the mind and comprehension of reality." —Shelf Awareness

“Mind-blowing… Binge’s latest offers a profound depth of ideas wrapped in a thrilling sci-fi story.”—Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW

“If Binge's well-reviewed previous novel, Ascension (2023), was Lovecraftian, his latest work is straight out of Philip K. Dick… Binge transports Dick’s nightmare landscapes, surrealism, and paranoia to his native United Kingdom, which adds a soupçon of Agatha Christie to the mix. Dissolution, then, is a hat trick of a novel, combining science fiction, mystery, and adventure.”—Booklist

“Binge combines a suspenseful plot with an inventive structure in this unnerving sci-fi thriller … With plausible science and multifaceted characters, this high-octane outing excites.”—Publishers Weekly

“With shades of Philip K. Dick, a dystopian novel that probes the darker corners of the mind…Time travel, mass extinction, the end of the world: It’s all here in a storyline that twists and turns like a spacecraft in a wormhole, rocketing toward an unforeseeable and unresolved ending. A nimbly constructed story that starkly explores the dangers of neuroscience run amok.” —Kirkus

"A vivid, unputdownable story, about love and loss and all it means to be human." —Sunyi Dean, author of The Book Eaters

"Dissolution is an outstanding puzzle box of a novel. It’s everything I love in fiction: thrilling, intelligent sci-fi with a touch of horror and a triumphant conclusion that made me want to punch the air in delight. As soon as I was done I wanted to read it all over again just to see how it all worked. It’s that good."—Gareth Brown, bestselling author of The Book of Doors

"A taut techno-thriller written with compassion and intelligence. This is an intricately plotted and - from a craft perspective - a technically difficult novel to write. And yet, Binge creates a compelling narrative that takes the reader on a page-turning journey through both time and memory."—T.R. Napper, author of 36 Streets and Ghost of the Neon God



Praise for Ascension

"You've gotta read Ascension. . .Old-school creepy."—Stephen King

"Smartly paced, deploying twists and turns strategically to keep the reader moving. . . For fans of well-wrought science fiction and cosmic horror scares, Ascension is worth the climb." —The New York Times

"[An] excellent page turner. . .a macabre, escapist pleasure for the thoughtful set."—The Wall Street Journal

"Binge's eerie speculative thriller looks both outward at the edges of scientific understanding and inward at the meaning of responsibility, remorse, and the human capacity for salvaging mercy from tragedy." —The Washington Post

From the Publisher

2025-02-15
With shades of Philip K. Dick, a dystopian novel that probes the darker corners of the mind.

Stanley Webb is in a bad way, as so many of his age: He’s in a memory ward, sinking into dementia, leaving his wife to tend single-handedly to a house that’s too large for her. Maggie—the true hero of Binge’s involving novel—is the second person to speak in the story; the first is a disembodied voice that announces, “I’m Hassan. Do you remember me?” Hassan offers an unsettling thought: Stanley isn’t suffering from Alzheimer’s, but instead, holed up in a nursing home cheerily called Sunrise, he’s having his memories selectively harvested. Someone is looking for something, that is, and that something goes all the way back to Stanley’s school days, when a mad-scientist tutor recruits him and two other teens, Raph and Jacques, into a secret project that’s designed to expand their memories—for, as Stanley brightly puts it, “If memory is what makes us human, then surely being able to remember more makes usmore human.” Soon enough Stanley, competing with his friends, is memorizing pi to the thousandths of places, memorizing Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet is an important leitmotif—and learning all about the concept called the apeiron, which, Stanley hazards, is “kind of like whatever existed before the big bang.” Fast-forward to an adult future, and it’s now Jacques’ turn to play the role of mad scientist—mad with a bent toward some very apocalyptic ends and, as he assures Maggie, quite prepared to “roll Stanley in here and slice open his throat in front of you.” Time travel, mass extinction, the end of the world: It’s all here in a storyline that twists and turns like a spacecraft in a wormhole, rocketing toward an unforeseeable and unresolved ending.

A nimbly constructed story that starkly explores the dangers of neuroscience run amok.

Kirkus Reviews