The Unmourned

Grief is a disease. Mourning is a crime. She was the one who took it away.

A literary dystopia about memory, mourning, and the terrible tenderness of a state that promises to take your pain away.

The city of Low Meridian survived the flood and the fever. What it could not survive was the grief that came after - the mothers who would not rise from the floor, the streets that simply stopped. So the survivors named their enemy, and built a mercy to defeat it.

Now the dead are Rendered, drawn down into a vast archive beneath the streets. The living are Solaced, their sorrow lifted out of them in a quiet room by gentle professionals. Mourning is a disease. Keening is a crime. And the Concord grieves with you, so that you need not grieve alone.

Wren Ostary is very good at her work. She has closed four thousand wounds and gone home each night with the small clean feeling of a wrong set right. Then her sister drowns saving strangers, and Wren - who knows the machine better than anyone alive - sits down in the chair and cheats it. She keeps her sister. Hidden, whole, carried in secret, against every law of the Concord.

What begins as one woman's refusal to let go becomes a descent: into the Cistern where the dead are kept, into an underground of people who still remember how to mourn, and into the truth of what the city's calm is actually made of. To free them, Wren will have to turn the machinery of forgetting against itself - and decide what the living owe the dead: to spare them, or to grieve them.

The Unmourned asks whether a grief you are forbidden to feel is any different from a love you were never allowed to have.