The Memory Vial

The Memory Vial is a dazzling fantasy set in a world where memories can be bottled, bought, and sold like fine wine, where you can inhale someone else's first kiss, a soldier's adrenaline-soaked cavalry charge, or a child's wonder at a birthday puppy, all for the right price. At the center of this bustling, morally murky trade is Jules Ramil, the sharp-witted owner of a memory shop called The Borrowed Life. She has spent years selling other people's feelings without ever letting herself feel too many of her own. That changes in an instant when a dangerously unstable vial slips from her fingers and floods her mind with the last thought of a dying soldier: an all-consuming love for a woman named Lira, complete with honey-in-the-tea and arguments-in-the-rain and all.

Now Jules is racing against the clock before a stranger's love permanently rewires her identity. But there's a catch: a duplicate of the same deadly vial was shipped to Keer Aldain, a brooding, war-scarred memory collector on the coastal cliffs of Brenmaris, and he's already opened it. Two strangers. One dead soldier's love. A woman named Lira somewhere out in the world, entirely unaware that she is currently the object of two people's borrowed hearts. The Memory Vial is a clever, emotionally rich adventure about grief, longing, identity, and the terrifying question of whether a feeling needs to be yours to be real.