The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Hope Arden is sixteen when her classmates begin to forget her, and by the end of that year her teachers cannot hold her name, her friends do not know her, and her mother sets a place for one. Nobody remembers Hope for more than a few minutes out of her presence. She has, accordingly, become a thief, since the finest security in the world is defeated by a guard who cannot recall the woman he spoke to a moment ago, and she has made a scholarship of it: languages, chemistry, safes, other people's lives observed at close range. Then a job in Dubai brings her into contact with Perfection, an app that rewards its users for self-improvement with points, treatments and access, and which is quietly producing a population that is beautiful, agreeable and identical. Hope decides to destroy it, and the company decides to find her, which is difficult but not impossible. North writes in a fractured, list-making, digressive voice full of encyclopaedia entries and half-finished thoughts, exactly right for a woman who exists only in her own continuity, and the book's real subject is loneliness rather than crime.