Without memory, how can a society survive? At the first stirrings of what proves to be a horrific pandemic, Jody and Millar work at a Virginia medical research facility. An amnesia drug has been withdrawn: it sparks amazing restorations but it also implants false memories. Nevertheless, for her own desperate reasons, Jody has stolen a batch, and as memory loss turns the world's billions into cataleptic husks, this drug becomes the survivors’ only hope to jury-rig a half-reliable identity.

The Memory Addicts is a star-crossed love story, and a plague story, but it's primarily the portrait of a dozen friends navigating a world in peril. At issue are the ways in which our dependence on memory shapes and shackles us. And the fragility of the stories that we live by, and that we leave behind us.