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Before long, Bouton’s company offers users the chance to access other peoples’ memories in exchange for uploading their own meanwhile a non-profit outfit has emerged to help the refuseniks escape. In this entirely mediated future there are “counters” who quantify individuals’ online activity, and “eluders” who choose to secede from digital life, leaving behind dummy identities.

He bases this innovation partly on the work of an anthropologist investigating trust networks in a remote Brazilian tribe. Bix Bouton, a “tech demigod on a first-name basis with the world”, has invented a program called “Own Your Unconscious” that allows users to “externalise” their memories and feelings into software. The landscape that develops is uncomfortably similar to the current digital realm. Yet Ms Egan spins a subtle web that connects them all-a chain that is completed, like many of the best fictions, in the reader’s own mind. The novel is a kaleidoscope of nearly two dozen characters and perspectives (readers may find they need a list to keep up).