Yesterday by Felicia Yap was just the novel I needed to break me out of a reading slump. The concept was refreshing, fascinating and added whole layers to the story while the characters were deplorable yet you ended up rooting for them regardless.

It is a thriller, set in world divided in two: those who can remember the day before (Monos) and those who can remember two days before (Duos). Due to their limited memories, the Monos tend to be treated as second-class citizens and marriage between Monos and Duos are both rare and frowned upon. As well as this, people can only remember their lives by writing ‘facts’ down in their journals, to be gone through the following morning. Add a murder to the mix and you have the recipe for a compelling novel about memory, society, fact and fiction.

There are four principal characters in Yesterday, all of which have their own point of view. Mark is a famous Duo novelist running for a political seat whose position stems heavily on his advocacy of mixed Mono-Duo marriages, being in one himself. Unfortunately, his Mono wife, Claire, feels inferior to him and unhappy in their marriage as a result of their memory differences. Enter Sophia, a woman who has just been released from an asylum after 17 years, who claims to have full memory capacity and blames Mark and Claire for ruining her life. Finally, we have Hans who is the detective tasked with solving the central murder of the novel, and whose whole career rests on the fact everyone thinks he is a Duo when, in fact, he is a Mono. This combination of characters makes for an intriguing cast, with conflict, emotion and revelations appearing in nearly all their interactions.

All in all, despite the characters and the intrigue surrounding the central mystery, what really drew me into this novel were the questions it raised around fact vs. memory. Hans, being a Mono, must solve the case in one day in order to be fully aware of all the facts. These facts, however, are mostly defined by what other characters have written down, and people could write down anything. The inability to remember gives people license to change the past but also allows that past to be taken away from them.

The novel itself isn’t perfect. The society is difficult to get your head around and the characters are very difficult to like. I also didn’t enjoy the ending and, if I were to read this novel again, I will probably stop reading before the epilogue, which just felt a little bit unnecessary and added a reasonable amount of confusion when it should have been rounding everything off. However, the writing and concept of this novel did capture my attention and, ultimately, Yesterday was the perfect novel for helping me to get back into reading.

More sci-fi than mystery and I don't read sci-fi novels, unable to engage with the concept and gave up at chapter two

A rare DNF for me. I hadn't realised that this would have such a strong element of sci-fi/dystopia and I struggled to engage with the setting, characters or plot.

It took me awhile to gain an understanding of this book and where it was going. It is quite removed from reality and contains an element of sci-fi. I suppose that is because I was expecting to read typical psychological thriller. Having said that, and when I got my head around Mono's and duo's. It all clicked into place and it gripped my attention.

The victim Sophia Alyssa Ayling, remembers everything (neither a Mono nor a duo), who is set to deliver revenge against MP Mark Henry Evans and his wife Claire (Mono). And yes it does take awhile to get your head around who is who and what they remember. This distracted from the book for me.

Sophia is suddenly found in the River, is it suicide or murder? Inspector Hans Richardson is set to investigate.

This is the type of book you will love or hate.

I received a free e-arc from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

DNF @ 9%.

I normally try read a lot more than 9% of a book before I decide not to finish it but unfortunately this book is just SO not my cup of tea. It makes no sense.

Its such a good premise but for me it really doesn’t work. So, everyone has some kind of memory issue- Monos remember only what happened yesterday, while elitist Duos remember the day before yesterday as well. But riddle me this: our main male character, Mark, a Duo, is a novelist. How can you write a novel if you can only remember what you did two days ago? He claims he rereads what he forgets, but surely that is impractical? I’ve written a novel or two and I’m sure if I had to spend every morning refreshing myself on what I’d already written, word for word, I’d never get round to writing very much at all!

Also, there are certain “facts” that the characters remember, but how does this work if they have little to no long term memory? And how do they choose what they remember and what they don’t? Claire, the female protagonist, can’t remember what she did two days ago but she remembers she is married, and to whom, and what his job is, etc. How?

Perhaps this is explained later in the book? Maybe I’ll pick this one up again one day to figure that out, but for now, I just can’t get past how illogical the whole thing is.

A good book with a surprising Si-fi twist. An exceptional example of it’s genre.

REadable thriller set in a world where some people can remember 2 days and some only one, they keep their memories on tablet computers. The plot is complex and the investigation of a crime partly depends on who remembers what. the investigating policeman has a one day memory but pretends to be a two day person (higher grade) and is forced to solve his cases in 24 hours so as not to be found out. The denouement is very twisted.

liked the idea, liked the writing but the ending was weak, and i was left with too many unanswered questions

Yesterday starts off with a fascinating premise. The world is divided into Monos, who only remember events of the past 24 hours, and Duos, who by virtue of remembering two days back, enjoy immeasurably higher status in society. Monos and Duos both need to keep meticulous diaries to be able to look up past events of which they have no recall, but 'facts' can be learnt - so people don't wake up with no recollection of the past at all, although what comes across as memory is in fact something that has been learnt. And anyone who claims to remember their full past is placed in a mental institution on the grounds of being delusional.

With this backdrop, we are presented with a murder mystery - a woman if found dead in a Cambridge river, wearing a too-large men's coat with the pockets weighed down with pebbles. The prime suspect is a famous Duo author married, unusually, to a Mono wife; the investigator is also a Mono, something he keeps secret from colleagues. So the case must be solved within a day, before his grasp of events slips his mind.

I found the set-up to be clever and riveting at the outset, but it's a hard one to sustain. Too many questions arise about the Mono/Duo world, and they get in the way of following the plot. How can facts be learnt if memory is wiped after a day or two? How do people manage to do things like remember their neighbours, go about daily activities like cooking and driving, find their way around? How does anyone manage to be an author??

There are many incidental pleasures, especially in the earlier part of the book - Steve Jobs and his amazing success with the iDiary, for instance, and Duo Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of 'a public memory-storage device called the World Wide Web... a means of placing and exchanging memories on an 'Internet' with no central manager or database'. But as the story progresses such pleasures become fewer and the plot gets a little bogged down in the logistics of maintaining the mystery-solving aspect without falling into too many holes created by the sci-fi premise. It's a well written story that is extremely readable, but I kept thinking that it would have worked better as straight-up sci-fi.

This book had a very good concept. The idea of being unable to remember anything beyond your immediate memories intrigued me. All you know is written in a notebook which you must always have with you in order to answer questions if necessary. This comes to the fore in the story as someone is murdered and the suspects have to rely heavily on what they deemed important enough to put in their diary. Unfortunately the various twists ended up confusing me, especially the ending which wasn’t quite right to me.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing a copy.

3.5 Stars

After reading the blurb for this story, I was so excited to read it! This story is about a society where you are divided not by class or race but by how long your memory is. You are either a mono (remembers 1 day) and Duo (remembers 2 days). Everyone keeps a diary to remind themselves of what has happened before.

This is told in four different perspectives, Claire and Mark who are in a mixed memory marriage (claire is a Mono and Mark and Duo), the case detective Hans and the victim Sophia. Hans has to try and solve a murder case in rapid time while he still has his memory.

This was a very intriguing read and a fantastic concept. Great characters, especially Sophia who I found very interesting. However I felt at times that it needed more work. With the society the way it was I was expecting more of a sci fi genre and not the present day society that was used.

A good read but could be so much better, and has a lot of potential. I will be very interested to see what the author comes up with next.

From the initial 'blurb' and genre listing of psychological/thriller/mystery, I din't expect this book to be fantasy/science fiction at all.

This is a world of mono's and duo's – mono's remember just one day, duo's remember two. Mono's are inferior to duo's. Mark and Claire are a mixed marriage; Mark is a duo and Claire a mere mono. The body of Mark's mistress has been washed up on the river Cam and Claire initially suspects her husband might have something to do with her death. Hans is the detective trying to solve what he suspects is murder, by the end of the day. He needs to do this within a day because he is a mono but also needs to keep this fact from his duo colleagues.

I found parts of this book confusing and also I wanted to shout “What does it matter? all will have been forgotten by three days anyway” - only they didn't seem to forget everything, which just added to my confusion of how all the mono/duo memories worked.

I can't say it's a favourite book and, as none of my friends read fantasy, I can't think who to recommend this book to other than fantasy/sci-fi readers.

I find myself kinda disappointed by this novel. The concept is interesting, that of people being divided by how many days they can remember of their life, but the plot was boring and predictable. It felt very cliche.

Claire, a Mono who can only remember the previous day of her life, is married to Mark, a Duo who can remember the last two days of his life. They are a very rare mixed marriage, and I liked this idea and how it is explored that this type of partnership is actually rather harmful to a successful marriage and mental health of the couple, despite its backing from the government.

I also found the difference between fact and memory really interesting. As the world relies on iDiaries, which they use to record their days in order to refer back or 'remember' people can effectively rewrite their memories, or what they believe are their memories.

However, the plot was rather loose, consisting of the murder of a Duo, with ties to Mark. The plot line is rather transparent and obvious from the beginning and I found it quite boring.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Yesterday is a novel set in Cambridgeshire in an alternate reality about a couple - Mark, who is a Duo and Claire, who is a Mono. This means that Claire can only remember things that happened yesterday and not before. Mark can remember things that happened yesterday and the day before. To overcome the fact that the most anyone can remember is the day before yesterday, everyone writes an iDiary at the end of every day to be able to check for facts of things that have previously happened.
Then one morning, the body of Mark's mistress is found floating in the river Cams. The detective, Hans, has the job of trying to solve the murder. Preferably in the same day.


I really enjoyed this book. Although at times it annoyed me slightly because obviously if your memories are coming from something you've written in a diary, you could completely fabricate the whole thing. However, I really didn't see the ending coming. Felicia Yap did well to put in her red herring. When you're getting towards the end you're thinking "well what about...?" And then bam, you find that was completely insignificant and the big reveal happens.

A bit too confusing for me, for some reason. I had trouble keeping up sometimes with who was speaking, and the plot was so convoluted and messy, I didn't really enjoy reading it. And what about the ending? Why just chop it off like that? It's almost like the author thought, "Yep, that's about enough. I'll stop there."

Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid.

Are you Mono or Duo? Confused?? I was when I embarked on one the most anticipated novels of the year. The confusion didn't last long before I was drawn in and totally hooked on this unique thriller.

So, what is mono and duo? Mono and duo relates to your memory and your capacity to remember. If you are mono, you remember everything that happened in the last 24 hours, if you are duo 48 hours.  Individuals are required to keep idiaries to record their daily life and to allow them to remember past 24 or 48 hours. Duo's are considered the elite within society, mono's with their capacity to remember less, are often thought of as less intelligent and treated as mere second class citizens.

All this is a little complicated when it comes to solving a murder and as the blurb on the book says 'how do you solve a murder when you can only remember yesterday'

That is exactly what police officer, Hans must do when the body of a woman is pulled from the River Cam in Cambridge.

Racing against time Hans sets himself the target of solving the murder in 24 hours, not easy when the main suspect is a high profile novelist and would be MP.

Meet Mark and Claire Evans. Supposedly happily married for the last 20 plus years, defying the odds that mixed mono, duo marriages can work, Mark is duo, Claire mono. Claire suffers from depression, and Mark is growing increasingly indifferent to Claire and their relationship and when it emerges he had an affair with the dead woman and is the prime murder suspect their relationship is plunged into complete disarray.

The body in the Cam is named as Sophie Ayling, a duo, a mysterious figure, with secrets.

Told from the perspective from Mark, Claire, Chief Inspector Hans and Sophie their pasts and what binds them altogether is slowly revealed.

This novel is clever, very clever, portraying a society ruled by idiaries, and a reliance on technology to document every part of a persons life. Yap is particularly adept at showing the effects it has on each of the characters, mono Hans racing to solve the crime before his memory disappears, and Sophie with her upper class duo mentality pouring scorn on those who are mono.

Sophie herself, is certainly the most interesting of all the characters and Yap is excellent at creating an air of mystery around her, slowly unveiling little bits of information to keep the reader hooked.

I occasionally got annoyed with Claire, finding her inability to deal with the situation a little tedious at times, but I guess this is perhaps how the author wanted us to feel. The authors use of Claire and Mark's relationship to highlight the inequalties between mono and duos was very cleverly done.  Mark always having the upper hand, Claire a little downtrodden until events force them to reexamine who they are as individuals and as a couple

The plot line twists and turns and the reader is never sure just who is guilty, who is telling the truth and who is lying. There is a twist towards the end that adds just that little extra!

Whilst it took me a while to get my head around the whole mono, duo theme this book is clever, engaging and enthralling. It is unique within its genre and a real breath of fresh air.

I would highly recommend yo read it!

Thank you to Wildfire and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review.

Man, I've had a hard time reading lately. I am an incorrigible mess of a person but moving back from BC to England threw me out of my routine far more than I ever could have imagined. I am however beginning to get back into the swing of things and this book was the first I finished since arriving back on the 1st September. It's fast paced, engaging and unique and, for me has earned its Observer commendation of:

"The Thriller of the Summer"
Title: Yesterday

Author: Felicia Yap

Publication date: August 1st 2017

Pages: 352

Blurb: 

There are two types of people in the world: those who can only remember yesterday, and those who can also recall the day before.

You have just one lifeline to the past: your diary. Each night, you write down the things that matter. Each morning, your diary tells you where you were, who you loved and what you did.

Today, the police are at your door. They say that the body of your husband's mistress has been found in the River Cam. They think your husband killed her two days ago.

Can you trust the police? 
Can you trust your husband? 
Can you trust yourself?

Firstly, a very big thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. 

So, I'm just gonna jump right in here. Yap paints a picture of a world almost identical to ours, the only difference being the way individual memory works. There are monos and duos in the world: monos remember only one day prior, duos (the higher class) retain two days of memory. She clearly draws comparisons between cultural and class divides that have existed in our own society and makes political comment on not only how wrong they are but what a huge influence they have on progression and change. Ultimately the story is about the solving of a murder but the way it unravels the human experience is awesome and if you're good at guessing plot direction please read this and tell me how soon you solved the murder. 

I will admit I found this to be a slow starter for me despite its compelling tag line. Mostly I put this down to one of the main characters being so wholly unlikable. I didn't care about Mark enough to want to read his story. Whilst he was clearly written this way deliberately Mark's character was a dominant narrator early on in the book and it took me a good while to generate enough interest in the story to keep reading. Rookie mistake. Yap nailed this book and I'm so glad I pushed past my initial reservations about it. I give the likeability of characters way too much of a hold over my enjoyment of reading and I was converted by this one. Yap's characters were complex and real.

The shifts between characters were well handled and worked seamlessly to create an intriguing and fluid story. It's themes and messages lingered with me a while after I had finished reading. The way our perspective shifts alters how we view each of the characters as the story progresses. The more of the truth that is uncovered, the less black and white things become.

She addresses how memories and experience define not only our experience of the world but define us as people; how what parts of truth we retain control our perception of others. How love is intrinsically tied with memory and the value of truth. If you ignore the weirdness of the alternate reality she's based the whole premise off of, it's brilliant - high concept and riveting. Actually, it's all those things anyway - I truly admire Yap for this creation. Whilst her version of the world is flawed it is executed very cleverly and the mechanics of her memory crazed world are explained very clearly throughout. A concept that might have been hard to get your head round is handled beautifully and provides a fierce difference to the plot, opening up new possibilities for the boundaries of the story. 

To be honest the real winning quality of this read was its sheer originality - it was unlike so many of its contemporaries and it had enough twists and turns to keep it from being predictable. It's maybe not the genre I am most compelled by but that is something that, following *this* novel I may choose to adjust. I am, since reading 'Yesterday' more inclined to pick up a thriller. It's unusual to find a mystery so intelligently disguised as this one. Yap completely made her own little niche in the genre with this one, combining elements of detective stories, relationship novels, social commentary and a sprinkle of what I might call dystopia. It's more that she altered the real world rather that going full sci-fi and making something grand and new. The very slight change to society as we know it was extremely effective at changing the story's whole dynamic - a feat I'm sure many writers find difficult to achieve.

Once I had it in my head (whilst I carried thoughts of it around for a while before picking it up again) I simply had to find a solution - I don't think it's a book you can be satisfied with without finishing. Seriously if you get stuck, really persevere with this one - it pays off I promise.  I hate DNFs as my Instagram followers will no-doubt notice, it often is the reason I get stuck in slumps - I'm obsessed with completion. This book *has* to be read from cover to cover to be truly appreciated and I'm 150% glad I fought past my jet lag and was able to truly appreciate Yap's talent and skill for storytelling.



 4 out of 5

 

It's not my genre but it certainly was a compelling and intelligently written read.

If you liked 'Yesterday' try Linwood Barclay's 'No Time for Goodbye'

This book wasn't one of my favourites, that being said it was an interesting concept and I'm sure others would enjoy it more than I did

I’m not sure I can really call this ‘science fiction’—‘alternate history/contemporary world’, rather?— and for once I find ‘speculative fiction’ is actually more appropriate. ‘Yesterday’ is set in a 2015 world where people, due to a gene getting inhibited when they become adults, lose their short term memories. ‘Monos’ can only retain the previous days, while ‘Duos’ can retain two days… but nothing more. In order to function, people therefore have to keep writing in their diaries, and make a conscious effort to learn the important ‘facts’ that happened to them.

I found this premise quite interesting, especially when it came to setting a mystery in that world: how would an investigator go about their job, link clues together, if they can only rely on written facts and not on actual memories? Because they’re bound to forget to write some details that would then become important, only at the time they looked so trivial they didn’t think them so. This is DI Richardson’s conundrum, as the main investigator in Sophia Ayling’s suicide-or-murder case, since he knows he has to solve this very quickly, otherwise he may miss some important clues. Just like potential suspects will literally forget what a crafty interrogation session could have made them say. All of this, of course, while keeping in mind an important question: are diaries reliable?

The story revolves around four characters’ narratives and diaries: Claire Evans, a Mono ex-waitress who married a successful Duo writer, but struggles daily with her feelings of inadequacy compared to her husband’s ability to remember more; Mark Evans, whose career as a writer isn’t so satisfying anymore, just like his marriage, and who’s tempted to veer towards politics… and mistresses; Sophia Ayling, a woman with the rare ability to remember everything… including tiny little slights that built up into hatred and a deep desire for revenge; and Hans Richardson, the inspector determined to crack the case in one day, but who also harbours secrets of his own.

In itself, it was a fast-paced enough read (everything happens over 24 hours, after all), and one that kept my attention; the plot twists were easy enough for me to guess, yet at the same time I still wanted to see how the characters themselves, with their limited day to day memories, would go about making sense of everything that happened to them.

In the end, though, the memory limit proved to ask more questions than it provided answers, making the world building kind of… shaky? The society depicted here seems to have been built on the short term memory problem as if it had been here from the start. But while I can see how modern technology (paper diaries, then iDiaries—hello, parallel world Apple that I thought interesting in spite of being a little too obvious) would allow people to function, it makes one wonder how science and said technology developed in the first place: at some point, how was writing invented, if people couldn’t remember what they did two days ago, and couldn’t put it in written words? For me, it would’ve been more credible if the genetic shift had happened later in history—well, maybe it did, but the story doesn’t tell.

The ending, too, left me sceptical. I see what the author did there, but it felt too convoluted and resting on chance events (or perhaps, should I say, on a stroke of genius on one character’s part, but what led to it seemed too much like a convenient plot device?). Also, I would’ve expected the inspector character to make less blunders—either that, or other characters bearing on him for making them, because in the end there were no real consequences.

Conclusion: 2.5 stars. It is an entertaining first novel, I just wished the memory loss premise had been exploited better.

This was a good idea which just did not work for me.
Mono's remembering one day and duo's remembering two days.
Due to keeping a diary you were supposed to be able to read back and remember what happened on previous days.
Well in my mind I would be writing the same thing every day.
Read diary, write in diary.