Ada Sibelius is twelve years old, painfully shy, and has never been to school. She is raised in 1980s Boston by her father David, the brilliant, eccentric, socially inept single parent who directs a university computer science lab and brings her to work beside him every day. Her closest confidant is ELIXIR, the language-processing program David built to learn human speech through conversation, and to which Ada pours out her ordinary days.
Then David's memory begins to fail. As his mind goes, his past comes apart with it: there is no record of the man he said he was, and no legitimate account of how Ada came into the world. Left effectively an orphan, she is taken in by David's colleague Diana Liston and her sons, and inherits the only thing her father managed to hand her while he was still lucid — a coded file whose meaning she will spend years trying to reach.
Moving between Ada's adolescence in 1980s Boston, her adult working life in San Francisco, and the buried decades of David's own youth, The Unseen World is a slow and methodical unravelling rather than a thriller. Liz Moore — who completed the book during her Rome Prize fellowship, drawing on a childhood spent around lab culture as a physicist's daughter — is interested in what a machine can be taught to remember, what a mind loses, and how much of a parent a child is ever permitted to know. Her third novel, published by W. W. Norton in 2016, following The Words of Every Song and Heft.