Henry Cole wakes from a dream that does not feel like a dream. By morning, the worst of it has faded, and he goes to work and drinks coffee and locks his door behind him the way he has done every day of his ordinary life. But over the following weeks, small things begin to slip. His keys are not where he left them. The light he turned off is on when he comes home. A coworker thanks him for staying late on an evening he does not remember staying.
He tries to dismiss it. He has not been sleeping well. His memory has been unreliable. The building has been having electrical problems. He has every reasonable explanation available to him, and he uses them, one by one, until they begin to run out.
But belief and truth are not the same thing. As Henry is asked to do something only he can do, the framework that has given his strange new life its shape begins to show a seam of its own - and the answer waiting underneath is not the one anyone was promised.
Residuals is a quietly unnerving novel about memory, attention, and love discovered late and lived deliberately. It asks what it means to be yourself when the evidence of who you are keeps slipping, and what's worth doing in the time you're given - even when you suspect the time is shorter than they've told you.