The Ferris Wheel of Memory: A Novel of Memory, Identity, and the Fight to Own Your Past Hardcover – March 17, 2026

Some doors don't open. They remember you.When investigative journalist Langdon Hughes receives an anonymous invitation from an organisation called the Ferris Initiative, he recognises the symbol on the letterhead immediately — a Ferris wheel, identical to the one in the only photograph he has of his father.Adam Hughes, a brilliant neuroscientist, vanished without explanation when Langdon was seventeen. Now, twenty years later, the Ferris Initiative claims to have built what his father theorised: a programme that allows a person not merely to remember the past — but to re-inhabit it. Langdon agrees to participate. What he finds inside the chair is more than memory. It is his grandfather's hands. His father's laboratory. A photograph that should not exist.As Langdon follows a trail of tapes, letters, and buried coordinates from Paris to an abandoned observatory in southern France, he uncovers a thirty-year conspiracy reaching from a Cold War-era research foundation to the intelligence agencies funding it — and to the moment his father understood what he had built and chose to disappear rather than let it be used.The Ferris Wheel of Memory is a gripping literary thriller about what we inherit, the truths we protect, and what it costs — across generations — to finally say what happened.Perfect for readers of Donna Tartt, Kate Atkinson, and Anthony Doerr. Read more