This was an enjoyable collection of short stories, with really interesting characters with bizarre happenings. I liked it.

This really wasn't for me. I thought it showed promise, but I didn't like most of these stories and I didn't want to revisit any of this.

Loved these stories, so interesting and felt fresh. I love to read things that are rooted in technology and science fiction but ultimately very realistic. Like Black Mirror some of the scenarios do not feel too far away.
Really interesting author, looking forward to more from her.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This series of short stories was really interesting and I enjoyed the concept but the book just wasn't my cup of tea unfortunately. I've recently discovered I'm not the biggest fan of literary fiction and unfortunately this was no exception.

Was recommended this as being "George Saunders-esque" and I agree! Thoroughly enjoyed this collection.

George Saunders-esque short stories. A bit too quirky for my personal taste. The formatting of the ARC made it nearly unreadable on my Kindle copy - it wasn't clear when one story ended and when another began.

As a massive fan of the Black Mirror series, I was really intrigued by this set of short stories. In a similar way to the anthology TV series, we explore worlds that are set in the not too distant future where technology and modern life seem fairly familiar but with a very dark edge.

I enjoyed some of the stories but I didn’t feel like the quality was consistent. Some of the tales (for example, ‘Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy’) seemed to go on slightly too long and were trying too hard to be witty. Keith Prime and The Age of Love were more up my street. I also found it incredibly difficult to know which story I was on due to the bad formatting of the book.

All in all, an interesting and different read, especially for fans of Black Mirror, but a couple of the stories could have been left out.

This collection was very much not for me – and I had been close to just putting it down, when the third story (Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy) was just brilliant and I spent the rest of my reading time chasing that high (which never came). South takes already uncomfortable premises and somehow makes them worse – and I do not like fiction that makes me feel like I need to take a shower. I admit that this is very much a me-thing and looking at other reviews made that very clear – there is a lot to love here, if you don’t mind sitting with discomfort.

I left the collection wondering if South does like the internet, at all, or even people, for that matter. Most of her premises lean into the possibility of technology making everything worse, while most her protagonists are genuinely awful people, or at least people at the whim of other horrible people. Her men are self-involved and rarely able to look outside their own problems, her women are often victim of either their own bodies or patriarchy. I did not enjoy my time with this book as it was way too bleak and hopeless for me.

Content warnings: rape, miscarriage, SIDS, trolling, depiction of graphic violence, killing of a cat, alcohol and drug abuse, fat shaming, death of loved ones, stalking, cheating

In the age of social media, You will Never Be Forgotten is an ambitious, timely collection of short stories. Each story covers an array of relationships, from parental to lovers and parasocial. "Camp Jabberwocky For Recovering Internet Trolls" is a poignant exploration of how the online world has turned malicious, and it really hit me hard.

Many of the stories settle in a realist territory, others are more speculative, but there is no doubt that they belong within the same collection. Some stories struck me more than others (I was more partial to the realist stories), but I look forward to seeing what South brings out next.

This is a peculiar collection of weird and wonderful stories that will leave you wanting more!

Some stories I liked, and some I loved. From trolls to ghosts, there is a lot going on, and I think there is a story for everyone. I loved thee writing, the strange concepts, settings and pacing. Definitely recommend!

A cluster of short, dark and just plain weird stories. This is not the genre I'm typically accustomed to and this was my 'try something new'. I don't think I'll be frequenting this genre again anytime soon (simply for no other reason than I didn't click with it) but I will admit that "You Will Never Be Forgotten" is fantastically done.

South writes so smoothly and doesn't try to be clever with her linguistic technique, so we immediately accept the society and ideas she presents to us and suspend our disbelief in order to be initiated in to this upside-down universe. A lot of settings are recognizable as our own but with a strange twist that plays with our sense of what is comfortable and what is strange, a really clever and intriguing little book.

In these short stories, South takes us to a dystopian place which doesn’t feel so far away. Despite some of the stories detailing advanced technology, or unimaginable concepts, they still feel strangely real and not altogether out of grasp.

We meet internet trolls, clones, careworkers, assault victims, ghosts, all of which are afflicted by some degree of unsettling circumstance. Each of South’s premises are original, and her imagination is something to be struck by; there’s something macabre in each object.

I tend to find most short story collections will have a mixture of hits and misses, and <i>You Will Not Be Forgotten</i> is no exception. In some stories I was incredibly gripped, in others definitely not so much, and sometimes not at all. South seems to favour an abstract and ambiguous ending in all of her offerings here, and most of the time that felt frustrating, particularly when the premise was excellent and could have been executed in a more satisfying way.

South’s edgy and exemplary skill here is obvious, and although it’s highly possible I’ve missed the point of it all, I would have much preferred more development of her ideas and for these to hit me harder.

I loved how unique and topical this was. So engaging and easy to read yet interesting at the same time. I adored the overall perception and writing about tech.

I seem to have a habit of getting attached to the first short story in a collection and wanting to read a whole novel of it, and this was another collection that had me feeling this way. The opening story reminded me of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. The narrator is a nurse, working in a warehouse full of ‘Keiths’. These Keiths, like in Never Let Me Go, seem to be clones. They are grown in labs, and then are kept alive but sedate, until their organs are needed, and then they act as donors. I thought this premise was really interesting, with the nurse forming a particular bond with one of the Keiths, and I really could have read an entire book based on this premise. But alas, it was only a short story!

Despite this initial attachment, I was still able to enjoy the rest of the collection. All of the stories are quite dark, many of them have a science fiction/dystopian aspect to them, and they’re all really creative and thought provoking. One of the later stories also stood out to me, where the narrator character is essentially an adult fanboy, and is intended as a parody of Star Trek fan culture if I’m not mistakne. The object of his affection is a woman who used to play a character on a science fiction show. The story chronicles his changing perspective of her as she falls in and out of favour with the media. It was an unusual perspective to write a story from, yet the narrator’s thoughts and attitudes towards this female actor (it came across as more towards the actor than her character for the most part) are not uncommon. It was uncomfortable to read this story as a woman, because while I’m obviously not a popular actor (or in fact any kind of actor, or any kind of popular), I know that famous women really are treated this way by the media, and these attitudes towards famous women are also indicative of attitudes these men have towards women in their lives as well.

The things addressed in this collection are incredibly wide ranging. Some (obsession with female celebrity) are closer to home than others (I really hope organ donor clones aren’t real…). This book deals with misogyny, abusive and neglectful parents, the internet age, the after-effects of rape, and, of course, technology. The effects of technology on the way we live is a recurring theme throughout the book, as is the theme of memory. In several stories, characters can’t let go of past traumatic memories, and react in very different, and very harmful ways to both themselves and others around them, aided by modern technology.

Presumably if you’ve already read this far you’ll have gathered this, but this definitely is not for younger readers. One story that I found the most entertaining details the addiction a group of elderly men in a care home have to phone sex lines, and the unexpected effects upon the staff members who start to record these calls for their own amusement. This is a great example of the ways technology impacts upon our relationships with others in negative ways: the care home staff abuse their power, the residents struggle with addiction to technology, and one staff member’s relationship is irrevocably damaged by the practice of recording these phone calls.

These stories, while dark, are certainly not entirely without humour, so if anyone has a dark sense of humour, this is the place to look. South carefully balances the serious themes she addresses with the more humourous element. They are also all incredibly varied, with very different perspectives and voices. The formatting of this ARC wasn’t always the best, among other small things some stories lacked titles. I mention this not to criticise the book — it didn’t really affect my reading experience and I’m sure this will be fixed before publication — but to offer kudos to the author. While the break between stories was not always clear from the format, the setting and voice were always so distinct that I very quickly realised we had moved on. A couple of the stories didn’t quite land for me, but the majority of them kept me engaged, and the writing style was consistently good throughout.

Mary South’s writing is really intriguing, and I would definitely keep an eye out for her in future. You Will Never Be Forgotten is a twisted, moving debut collection, an examination of humanity at its worst.

Rating: 4 stars.

This is a mixed bag collection of 10 short stories and I struggled to get into most of them. In part, this was due to the proof formatting, which meant not all stories started with the title (I was half way through one before I realised it was a different story). First published in The New Yorker, the title story - You Will Never Be Forgotten - is about a content moderator “at the world’s most popular search engine” who follows her rapist is a standout chapter. Not Setsuko is also really provocative. Sadly, the other stories didn’t connect for me.

This collection is one that will stay with the reader well after its final pages. Mary South’s skill in jumping off from sci-fi concepts to create fulfilling narratives that range widely in tone, perspective, and character makes this book one to read. Although there may be some misses among the ten stories here, I found plenty to love in nearly all of them. It’s worth re-reading, as well. Some of the early stories, which I found weaker than those in the second half, would likely resonate more with a broader sense of South’s ambitious project in this debut. The stories maintain a focus on revealing their characters, with the compelling technological conceits acting simultaneously as catalyst for development and a source of tension and uncertainty. In many cases the advances in the stories seem only ever so slightly beyond our own. It reminded me quite a bit of the standout collection “Friday Black” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in the way that exaggerated circumstances create conflict for characters that the authors have led us to care about. While there are frequent touches of humor, there are at least as many moments of genuine emotion, particularly in the later stories. The memorable title story seemed to me to be an inflection point in the collection. Overall, the stories take disparate approaches to form a coherent, memorable whole. This is a book we’ll be talking about for a long time.

Mary South’s debut collection of short stories, You Will Never Be Forgotten, was billed as being about people who ‘attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves’. The first thing to say is that isn’t an accurate description of this collection at all. Only two or three of the stories really focus on technology, and of those, only ‘Keith Prime’ really explores its speculative implications by depicting a facility that nurtures sets of human beings so they can be used as organ donors. ‘Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls’ is yet another reflection on the distorted lives that people live through the internet, a poor reflection of sharper, more satirical short stories on this topic such as Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Suicide, Watch’ in her Heads of the Colored People. Meanwhile, ‘You Will Never Be Forgotten’, where a woman who works as a content moderator for a search engine tracks her rapist down in real life, is one of the better stories in the collection, but still feels a little flat and familiar.

At its worst, You Will Never Be Forgotten serves up imaginative and bizarre situations, like the woman who breastfeeds a series of adult men staying at her hostel, but then spells out exactly what we ought to take from this story: ‘Not one of you has bothered to find out the reason I’m here’, the woman complains to the men, ‘Do you think you’re the only ones who need love? I’m done. Consider yourselves weaned.’ (Earlier on, to underline the point, the group read the ending of Peter Pan, where it’s explained that Wendy’s female descendants will become Peter’s mother in their turn, while he remains an eternal child.) At its best, however, this collection shows some promise, even if South isn’t really that interested in tech: my favourite story was ‘Not Setsuko’, which draws from the imagery of J-horror to tell the story of a mother who is forcing her daughter to relive every important moment in the life of her older sister, who died at the age of nine. This creepy tale has some interesting things to say about childhood, parenthood and ‘making memories’, and it’s here that South is at her most original.

As with all short story collections, a mixed bag. I was expecting a slightly more sci-fi bent from the blurb, but that was only the case for a few of the stories. The first in the collection, about a woman looking after clones grown for spare organs, is probably the best, though I also enjoyed the parody of Star Trek fandom. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Gifting readers with a small collection of stories, South provides an insight of how people use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair. We're introduced to a plethora of people; a widow who is working at a human organ farm; a nurse who discovers his residents have started dialling hotlines; a journalist who was raised by her grandparents after the murder of her mother. The list goes on for maybe a little too long. With every collection of stories, there will always be those that don't quite hit the mark. With You Will Never Be Forgotten, unfortunately it was a greater amount that I struggled to connect with.

A fascinating and modern look at how we live surrounded by technology and how people use it to escape their lives and feelings.