I really wanted to enjoy this, the description seemed so promising and interesting however I just couldn't get on with this as a read.

Placeholder. To be updated when I have completed the book - apologies I accidentally put the wrong review here! Will come back once I have finished it with a better view

A funny and provocative short story collection. A fascinating look at modern life and how we live now.

“You will never be forgotten” is a collection of short stories about technology and the impact it has on our lives. There were some stories such as the one based in the care home I enjoyed. However for most of them, I couldn’t engage with the story and lost interest quickly. I stopped reading and didn’t finish the book.

Thank you for the opportunity to review advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest opinion.

This is a dark but funny short story collection that was a bit of a mixed bag. ‘About Your Craniotomy’ written as a guidance document by a frustrated medic was hilarious, and ‘Architecture for Monsters’ had a premise that could have been a whole novel, with excellent world building. But some stories, like one about a presumably fictional TV series called Starship Uprising and its actors, just didn’t hold my attention and I found myself rushing through to finish.

In this unique debut collection of short stories, we meet a wide range of characters who all use technology and all it's advancements in some way to escape their life, to create lives and destroy them.

From a woman working for the largest internet platform in the world stalking her abuser, to a revered architect with a strange relationship with her daughter, a nurse who works with the first artificially created humans and a worker in a care home spying on the secrets of the residents, this collection draws on the most selfish, desperate and secrets parts of humanity and puts in on display for everyone to see. In a way it feels like a strange, dream-like sci-fi as we delve into some of the more complex stories, thinking about the ways technology might change our lives further in the future.

Now, yes while technology and social media can have strange and negative effects on our lives, it's also one of the most amazing things humanity as a collective have ever achieved - but while I know this is a work of fiction it does read like it has a severe distain towards technology as a whole.

Strange, unusual and somewhat uncomfortable, this book contains references to some heavy, serious subjects so I don't recommend it for any light reading.

Personally the stand-outs for me were 'Keith Prime' , 'You Will Never Be Forgotten' and 'Frequently asked questions about your craniotomy' - the latter being brilliantly written. Starting as a formal, informational leaflet and watching as the narrator unravels and becomes more personal - this was an amazing peice of writing and stood out amongst the rest to me. Unfortunately, this book started off with strong stories and then for me started to lose my interest as I got further into the book - some of them were just too disturbingly uncomfortable to read, like the Promised Hotel, and while I'm sure this is supposed to it definitely got too much for me in this instance.

The stories were mostly quick and easy to read but some of them left me wanting just a little bit more. Mary South has a distinct, unique voice and a visceral way of showing a story and I'd definitely be interested to read something longer by her in the future.

These short stories were fantastic. They were both grim and funny, and they were so original - from a weird retreat to an organ harvesting factory to a dysfunctional relationship between a mother and her daughter... They cover such a range of topics, but they all made sense together, and they resemble nothing I have read. They are wonderfully written - funny, clever, ironic, brutal at the same time. I loved them and wish there were more.

I loved this collection. I can’t put my finger on exactly why but they were my cup of tea for sure. I loved their modernity their unusualness and slightly absurdness. A clever collection for sure

In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover the greatest depths of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction – one that could only belong to Mary South. A great collection of stories which I throughly enjoyed

You Will Never Be Forgotten is a collection of strange and provocative short stories, often involving technology and trauma. Just hearing the fact the stories have premises like a camp trying to rehabilitate young internet trolls and a content moderator for 'the world's biggest search engine' stalking her rapist gives a sense of what might be expected, tales that are dark and absurd and often very critical of modern life. The collection also plays with structures and narrative voices, using a leaflet about a craniotomy to tell a story and creating a chorus 'we' voice from an internet forum for a popular sci-fi show to demonstrate the power and changing tides of online fans.

I'm not a huge fan of short story collections normally, but I was sold on the idea of weird, provocative stories, and I did enjoy quite a few of the stories in the collection, though others I didn't like so much. My favourite was possibly 'camp jabberwocky for recovering internet trolls', though I also liked the unnerving concept of 'not setsuko' in which a mother tries to replace her dead daughter by bringing up her new daughter identically. The titular story, about the content moderator, has some good satire about content moderation and the treatment of women, and 'to save the universe, we must also save ourselves' manages to combine a lot of aspects of online fan culture with a gamergate vibe.

However, I found some of the other stories, like 'architecture for monsters' and 'realtor to the damned' quite boring and hard to get into. Some of them, like one about men breastfeeding from a woman, were perhaps trying a bit too hard to be shocking, though I do think the short story form is quite a good one for doing that anyway, without the need to sustain something ridiculous for a long time. The stories can also be a bit unrelentingly bleak, especially about technology and the effects of trauma on people's lives, so the ones that are a bit more silly do bring a bit of balance, though overall the book is pretty damning on the modern technological world.

I've seen this compared to Black Mirror and Chuck Palahniuk, and those probably are useful frames for deciding if you might want to read You Will Never Be Forgotten, though I'd suggest more of the latter than the former. I enjoyed the inventiveness of both the structure and premises of the stories, but didn't feel like all of them hit the mark.

Great collection of stories that intrigue, provoke and move the reader. I highly enjoyed every minute I spent reading them.