Perfect for fans of The Scent Keeper and The Keeper of Lost Things,
an atmospheric and enchanting debut novel about two women haunted by
buried secrets but bound by a shared gift and the power the past holds
over our lives.
Ev has a mysterious ability, one that she
feels is more a curse than a gift. She can feel the emotions people
leave behind on objects and believes that most of them need to be
handled extremely carefully, and—if at all possible—destroyed. The
harmless ones she sells at Vancouver’s Chinatown Night Market to scrape
together a living, but even that fills her with trepidation. Meanwhile,
in another part of town, Harriet hoards thousands of these treasures and
is starting to make her neighbors sick as the overabundance of
heightened emotions start seeping through her apartment walls.
When
the two women meet, Harriet knows that Ev is the only person who can
help her make something truly spectacular of her collection. A museum of
memory that not only feels warm and inviting but can heal the emotional
wounds many people unknowingly carry around. They only know of one
other person like them, and they fear the dark effects these objects had
on him. Together, they help each other to develop and control their
gift, so that what happened to him never happens again. But unbeknownst
to them, the same darkness is wrapping itself around another, dragging
them down a path that already destroyed Ev’s family once, and threatens
to annihilate what little she has left.
The Memory Collectors
casts the everyday in a new light, speaking volumes to the hold that
our past has over us—contained, at times, in seemingly innocuous
objects—and uncovering a truth that both women have tried hard to bury
with their pasts: not all magpies collect shiny things—sometimes they
gather darkness.
