Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Book Soup, West Hollywood
For fans of _Cloud Atlas_ and _The Power_, a hauntingly beautiful and prescient debut set in a future where a renamed China is the sole global superpower. When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me stories of a world before memories could be shared between strangers... In a far-off future ruled by the Qin Empire, every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank, an intracranial device capable of recording and transmitting memories between minds. This technology gives birth to Memory Capitalism, where anyone with means can relive the life experiences of others. It also unleashes opportunities for manipulation: memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain. After the sudden passing of his mother, an unnamed narrator inherits a collection of banned memories from her Mindbank so dangerous that even possessing them places his freedom in jeopardy. Traversing genres, empires, and millennia, they are tales of sumo wrestlers and social activists and armless swimmers and watchmakers, struggling amid the backdrop of Qin's ascent toward global dominance. Determined to release his mother's memories to the world before they are destroyed forever, the narrator will risk everything--even if the cost is his own life. Powerful and provocative, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us masterfully explores how governments and media manipulate history to control the collective imagination. It forces us to see beyond the sheen of convenient truths and to unearth real stories of sacrifice and love that refuse to be eradicated. Steph Cha is the author of the Juniper Song mystery series and Your House Will Pay, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller and the California Book Award for Fiction. She is the series editor of the Best American Mystery and Suspense anthology. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She's spent the last several years working in television, and is the co-creator of Butterfly, now streaming on Prime.