The Merge
A Radio 2 Book Club Pick
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- 9,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NEW ADULT BOOK PRIZE 2026
'[A] clever and provocative debut ... smart and engaging – like Nineteen Eighty-Four crossed with Never Let Me Go.' Daily Mail
'A compelling and disturbing story of love and sacrifice, control and resistance.' Guardian
Once the process begins, there can be no going back, we will always be together…
Laurie is sixty-five and living with Alzheimer’s. Her daughter Amelia can’t bear to see her mother’s mind fade. Faced with the reality of losing her forever, Amelia signs them up to take part in the world’s first experimental merging process for Alzheimer’s patients, in which Laurie’s ailing mind will be transferred into Amelia’s healthy body and their consciousness will be blended as one.
Soon Amelia and Laurie join a group of other merge participants: teenage Lucas, who plans to merge with his terminally ill brother Noah; Ben, who will merge with his pregnant fiancée Annie; and Jay, whose merging partner is his unwilling addict daughter Lara.
As they prepare to move to The Village, a luxurious rehabilitation centre for those who have merged, they quickly begin to question whether everything is really as it seems.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walker debuts with a frightening glimpse into a near-future London ravaged by climate change, where the government, in an effort to conserve resources, has launched a new procedure called the Merge, in which the minds of two people are joined in one body known as a Combine. Those who refuse are hit with a heavy tax and made into social pariahs. Amelia Anderson, a 23-year-old videographer, stridently opposes the Merge, but when her painter mother, Laurie, is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, they sign up to be the first Combine involving someone with dementia. Amelia secretly plans to abandon the Merge at the last minute, keeping her intentions even from Laurie, and she films the preparations for a planned documentary. Somehow, though, their merging is completed, and they wake up at a heavily controlled treatment center where the surgeon greets them as Laura-Amelia. From here, the novel is narrated in the first-person plural, as Laura-Amelia tries to figure out what happened. It's an impressive swerve, and Walker effectively blends climate dystopia and body horror, especially in the novel's chilling final twist. Readers of The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins will enjoy this.
