Thirteen-year-old Jenna Metcalf, searching for her mother Alice, an elephant researcher who vanished ten years ago after a death at an elephant sanctuary, discovers that she herself died that night, and that her helper, former detective Virgil Stanhope, is also a ghost.

On an island where things and their memories keep “disappearing,” enforced by the sinister Memory Police, the unnamed novelist narrator hides her editor R, who can still remember.

In a small Tokyo café where customers can travel back in time as long as they return before their coffee gets cold, the café owner’s wife, Kei, who is pregnant and has a heart condition, travels forward to meet her future daughter.

The Professor, a brilliant mathematician whose memory lasts only eighty minutes since a car accident, is eventually moved to a care home as his health declines.

Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old who has worked happily in the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years, quits under pressure from family and friends and from the lazy, bitter Shiraha, who moves in with her.

Mikage Sakurai, who lost her grandmother and found comfort with Yuichi Tanabe and his transgender mother Eriko, supports Yuichi after Eriko is murdered.

Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa survive the government’s “Program,” in which a class of forty-two students must kill each other on an island until one remains, thanks to the transfer student Shogo Kawada.

Middle-school teacher Yuko Moriguchi, whose four-year-old daughter was killed by two of her students, takes revenge after quitting.

William Mandella, a soldier who fought for more than a thousand years of Earth time thanks to relativistic travel, learns that the war with the alien Taurans started by mistake and has ended.

Edward and Florence, newlyweds in 1962, separate after a disastrous wedding night in a Dorset hotel.