The Setting Down (The Long Memory)
Ossa Reyne got a thing wrong at the telling this year, out loud, in front of eighty people, and put it right in the same breath. She is eighty-one. She holds five hundred and six entries, the long way, entire, and she has not taken a new one in six years and not lost one that anybody can prove. The arithmetic is not complicated. It is only a question of who is going to carry five hundred and six true things when the one mouth that has always carried them finally cannot.
Sabel Weir spends the year finding out. Some of Ossa's entries can be poured, taking by taking, into younger mouths willing to carry another life's worth of debts, boundaries, and grievances on top of their own. Terrick takes forty in a single sitting. Sesi, seven years old, gets her first. But some of what Ossa holds cannot be poured anywhere. There is no house left to take it, no name left to hold it against, nobody alive who was ever meant to receive it. For those, the country has never had a form, because a country that trusts memory has never before had to ask what happens to a truth that has outlived every person it was ever true about.
So they invent one. It is called a releasing: each unheld thing said once, entire, aloud, before witnesses, with nothing left out for time, and then set down for good. Forty-one of Ossa's five hundred and six will be released this way, out loud, in the cold, on ground, and Sabel will be the one entering it.
THE SETTING DOWN is the fifth book in The Long Memory, and it turns the series toward the question no telling has ever had to answer: not what happens when a memory drifts, but what happens when the person holding a country's oldest truths runs out of years to hold them. It is a book about the difference between forgetting a thing and setting it down on purpose, in front of witnesses, so that letting go is itself an act of memory and not a failure of it.
Quiet, exacting, character driven post apocalyptic fiction about what a country owes the truths it can no longer carry, and the woman who has to decide how to say goodbye to five hundred and six of them, one at a time, out loud.
The Long Memory series:
Book 1: The Unheld. A country that writes nothing down has to trust somebody's mouth instead.
Book 2: The Short Form. The short way to say a thing is not always the true way.
Book 3: The Marks for People. Every mark on a person is a debt somebody else agreed to.
Book 4: The Small True Thing. The small true thing is the one nobody thought to check.
Book 5: The Setting Down. Some debts are so old the only mercy left is to let them go.
Book 6: A Thing That Is Done. A thing that is done once gets done again, for better and for worse.
Book 7: The Way In. The one true thing in the whole country turns out to be the one thing nobody ever checked.
Book 8: The Next Fault. She built the only tool that could ever find her own mistake, and used it.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
