The Memory Painter - Book Review

From the cover :

What if there was a drug that could help you remember past lives?
What if the lives you remembered could lead you to your one true love?
What if you learned that, for thousands of years, a deadly enemy had conspired to keep the two of you apart?

Bryan Pierce is an internationally famous artist whose paintings have dazzled the world. But there's a secret to his success: Every canvas is inspired by an unusually vivid dream. When Bryan awakes, he possesses extraordinary new skills...like the ability to speak obscure languages and an inexplicable genius for chess. All his life, he has wondered if his dreams are recollections, if he is re-experiencing other people's lives.

Linz Jacobs is a brilliant neurogeneticist, absorbed in decoding the genes that help the brain make memories, until she is confronted with an exact rendering of a recurring nightmare at one of Bryan's shows. She tracks down the elusive artist, and their meeting triggers Bryan's most powerful dream yet: visions of a team of scientists who, on the verge of discovering a cure for Alzheimer's, died in a lab explosion decades ago.

As Bryan becomes obsessed with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the scientists' deaths, his dreams begin to reveal what happened at the lab, as well as a deeper mystery that may lead all the way to ancient Egypt. Together, Bryan and Linz start to discern a pattern. But a deadly enemy watches their every move, and he will stop at nothing to ensure that the past stays buried.

A taut thriller and a timeless love story spanning six continents and 10,000 years of history, The Memory Painter by Gwendolyn Womack is a riveting debut novel unlike any you've ever read.

My thoughts : 

I was completely absorbed by The Memory Painter by Gwendolyn Womack. Last week was unusually busy and I had much less time to read but I couldn't wait to sneak a moment here and there to find out what was happening to Bryan and Linz as they journeyed through their memories.

The plot moves along quickly and is very intriguing. There are twists to keep the reader guessing. It's just such a unique premise that I was simply mesmerized. I love when books shock me with the sheer genius of the idea--like The Time Traveler's Wife or Life After Life.

Character development becomes key as Bryan and Linz realize some of the character traits come from past lives and some are all their own. Each person in the story is an individual, yet also a combination of all their previous lives, remembered and not remembered. Womack excels at making the reader believe that her characters had lived thousands of lives before.

The Memory Painter isn't bound by any one genre and that makes it exciting and unpredictable. With elements of a thriller,  historical fiction, science fiction and some romance, Womack's novel is sure to appeal to everyone. I appreciated that the novel was also clean enough to be able to recommend it to all my friends. In fact, it's the book I'll be pushing on my friends this summer.

The Memory Painter by Gwendolyn Womack is published by Picador and released on April 28, 2015.

**I received a complimentary copy of The Memory Painter. No additional compensation was received. All opinions are my own.**