Book 8: Remember You Will Die (2024) - Eden Robins

Friday March 20*

What is the book about?

Told entirely through obituaries and ricocheting through time, Remember You Will Die is an innovative, genre-bending epic about the messy tapestry of human history and the threads that connect us, told through the eyes of Peregrine, an AI mother grappling with the unexpected death of her human daughter, Poppy. And from the newspaper clippings of individual lives emerges something else unexpected: generations entwined through blood and art and the consequences of their actions, betrayals, and redemptions that traverse our dying world and beyond.

Fragment (to get an idea of the style)

“We are doubtless all quite familiar with the art of floriography. Naturally, in our fast-paced modern times, this art is now considered somewhat passe among gentlewomen, but when en vogue, floriography was adhered to as fervently as any fashion plate. Floriography grafted meaning and symbolism to different flowers, and even different hues and shades of a single species, as well as to the replacement of flowers upon one’s person.”

First sentence

“An unknown teenage girl has drowned, according to an anonymous cell phone call to the 1st precinct this morning.” 

Remember You Will Die is also available at University's Library.

Looking back on Day 8 of the challenge

The last novel of this challenge. We did see familiar names amongst the participants. Well done, you made it! Eight days in which your creative minds were activated. Eight books that may end up on your bedside table. We wish all participants many happy hours to read and write the coming months.

A mainstream detective or something else?

The start of Remember you will die sounds like a mainstream detective. An unknown teenage girl has drowned. Some of you took that mainstram idea a bit further with a police-officer that might become the unexpected hero in this story: That same morning, a sleepy policewoman at a sleepy policestation in a precinct with a much higher, and thus, unassuming number, shoots up from her sleepy office chair. Some tapped into the reader's need for mystery by continuing: Her backpack had washed ashore several miles down the swirling river due to the strong current stringing it along. It contained only a notebook, letters no longer legible. Gripping starts!

But we also saw entries who did something else. They took into account that this book is not a mainstream detective. As the abstract says, it is about an AI mother with a human daughter. The winning entry worked with that. Making a cross-over from the expected grief a mother would feel when losing her daughter and the alienation of non-human forms of intelligence.

The winning start of Begin a Book, Day 8:

An unknown teenage girl has drowned, according to an anonymous cell phone call to the 1st precinct this morning.Soon, she'll become just a number, the third drowning in that lake, the twentieth girl that year or just one of the many unsolved dyings. Although her mother thrives on numbers, or actually consists of numbers, she will never, not in a thousand years, remember that day as just the two hunderd and thirty first day of her twenty sixth year of existence.

Lisan Ekster (student of History)

Congrats, Lisan!

Nice to know

• This book is told in a highly unusual way: the entire narrative is built almost entirely from obituaries and newspaper-style clippings.