The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Hope Arden is forgotten by everyone she meets within a minute or two of their looking away. It began when she was sixteen: her father forgot to drive her to school, her mother set the table for three instead of four, and a friend looked at her and saw a stranger. Her family, her friends and everyone she has met since lose her the same way, a minute or so after she leaves the room. Hope narrates the book herself, and she has made the only living the condition allows: she is a thief, and a very good one, because nobody who sees her take something will remember her face.

Then she meets Reina bint Badr al Mustakfi, a young woman as overlooked in her own way as Hope is, and Reina kills herself. Hope comes to blame Perfection, a lifestyle app that awards its users points for remaking themselves toward a narrow ideal of wealth and beauty. She sets out to destroy it. A dark web operative called Byron hires her to steal the software's code, a ruthless man who goes by Gauguin crosses her path, and an Interpol inspector, Luca Evard, tries to catch a woman he cannot hold in his head for more than a few minutes. The chase moves across the world, through Dubai, Tokyo and the Mediterranean.

This is a long book, and North takes her time. Hope thinks in lists, counts, digressions and half finished sentences, and the story pauses often while she considers memory, loneliness and what it would mean to be someone no one can know. Some readers find that voice absorbing; others find it repetitive, and several reviewers felt the story runs on well past its climax. The heist plot is clever, but the reason to read it is Hope herself. It suits readers of North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and anyone who likes a thriller that stops to think about how technology shapes who we want to be.