Yiming Ma

These Memories Do Not Belong to Us
For fans of American War and Cloud Atlas, a hauntingly beautiful and prescient debut novel set in a future where a renamed China is the sole global superpower and citizens can record and transfer memories between minds.
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Forthcoming August 12 2025 via Mariner Books (U.S.) & McClelland & Stewart (Canada)​​
A Constellation Novel by Yiming Ma
"When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me stories of a world
before memories could be shared between strangers…"
In a far-off future ruled by the Qin Empire, every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank, an intracranial device capable of recording and transmitting memories between minds. This technology gives birth to Memory Capitalism, where anyone with means can relive the life experiences of others.
It also unleashes opportunities for manipulation: memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain. After the sudden passing of his mother, an unnamed narrator inherits a collection of banned memories from her Mindbank so dangerous that even possessing them places his freedom in jeopardy.
Traversing genres, empires, and millennia, they are tales of sumo wrestlers and social activists and armless swimmers and watchmakers, struggling amid the backdrop of Qin’s ascent toward global dominance. Determined to release his mother's memories to the world before they are destroyed forever, the narrator will risk everything—even if the cost is his own life.
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Powerful and provocative, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us explores how governments and media manipulate history to control the collective imagination. It forces us to see beyond the sheen of convenient truths and to unearth real stories of sacrifice and love that refuse to be eradicated.
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Praise for These Memories Do Not Belong to Us

"Chilling, poignant, and uncomfortably timely. Ma’s braided memory dispatches explore a future in which the shifting concepts of safety, loyalty, and truth lead nowhere except condemnation.”
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—Tessa Hulls
Pulitzer Prize winner for Feeding Ghosts
"Mesmerizing. A deeply felt and meticulously crafted novel that entrances the reader from the first sentence to its last."
—Jason Mott
National Book Award winner for Hell of a Book
“This isn’t just a novel. It’s a revolutionary experiment in how our memories and histories can save us. By turns heartbreaking and eerily prescient, Ma’s ambitious debut breaks open the hidden parts of us and scatters them across the night sky for you to discover.”
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—Sequoia Nagamatsu
Bestselling author of
How High We Go In the Dark
“Stunning. A deeply imaginative debut of a near-future dystopia, profoundly humane in its exploration of memory and the stories that make us who we are.”
—Vincent Lam
Giller Prize winner for
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
“Yiming Ma’s gripping, kaleidoscopic debut marries our current anxiety around surveillance, technology, personal data, and geopolitical unrest with a world where stories remain a tool for connection, and revolution.”
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—Lillian Li
Women's Prize longlisted author of
Number One Chinese Restaurant
“Extraordinary. A melancholic mosaic of lives brilliantly bearing witness to the ways memories shape and reshape individuals, nations, histories and futures.”
—Ai Jiang
Nebula & Bram Stoker Award winner for Linghun