https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2023/07/2023107-last-witness-k-j-parker.html ( )

I'll remember this one.

I shouldn't have started this at 7am because I couldn't stop until it was over.

Just the right length, probably. I might need to read it again to understand the timeline exactly.

Fantastic prose. Painful story. Good stuff. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3821938.html

It's a grimly convincing story of a man who is able to extract and delete specific memories from other people, but with the consequence that he himself retains those memories; and he never forgets. He's not a pleasant character, but it's a very well-drawn story, and would probably have got a vote from me if it had been on any list I could have voted for. ( )

Holy shit.

The Last Witness is more of a novella than a novel, but holy cow does it pack a lot in. Our nameless protagonist can go into people's heads and remove memories, which he then keeps for himself. Think The Giver, but darker. This is a fairly lucrative skill, so he puts his talent for hire to the highest bidder.

Despite the short length, this book is incredibly complex. The narrator is not reliable in the slightest. He occasionally relives a stolen memory, still in the first person POV, and it's up to the reader to figure out which memories are his and which are stolen ones.

This book makes you really think.

Did I mention the protagonist is an asshole? Because he is. Completely. He's almost entirely without morals, enjoys others' pain and misery, and is rather pathetic.

And I love it. I love the jerk narrator. I love how confusing this book is, how after I finished I had to go back and reread certain sections that now meant something entirely different. I love how twisted and messed up this story is. I love how small and contained it is.

I wasn't expecting to love this book. But I do. ( )

In a world that is recognizably not our 18th or early 19th century, the teller of this tale is a man with an interesting talent. He can take memories from your mind so neatly that you'll never know the stolen memory is gone. He's made a nice business of this. Some people will always have memories that are too painful and they wish to be free of. Others will have memories that it would make their lives easier to have someone else forget. Unfortunately, once he's removed a memory from your mind, he has it in his--forever.

And some of the people he does business with are dangerous men, who might want to eliminate the last "last witness." Eventually, he outwits the gambling compulsion he picked up somewhere along the line, and manages to retire in relative comfort, with little need to associate with other people at all.

That's when he discovers there's someone else in the world who has his talent, and even fewer ethical standards. It's someone to whom he has a connection that painfully close.

What follows is a battle of wits, political intrigue, and painful choices for our storyteller, who freely admits he's "no angel." He is no angel, but this time he's determined to retire. And he'll use all the skills he's acquired from memories stolen over the years to do so with no harm to himself, and minimum harm to innocent bystanders.

It's a complicated story, and our narrator would be the last one to claim that he's in any way a reliable narrator. He remembers everything, but often can't keep track of which memories are his own and which originally belonged to someone else. He also won't hesitate to lie. At first I though this was going to be a mildly interesting but not compelling story. In the end, I found that somewhere along the line, I'd been completely drawn in and cared deeply what happened to this character and his, ah, the other person.

Recommended.

I listened to this in the Tor.com Collection: Season 1, which I bought. ( )