You Feel It Just Below the Ribs

The book presents itself as an annotated found manuscript, with an editor's note explaining where it came from and what has been redacted. Inside it, Miriam Gregory writes her own life: a childhood torn apart by a decades-long war, a career in the new institutions that ended it, and her part in the work that came after.

The peace was built on the theory that families and unmanaged memory are what produce nations, and nations are what produce wars. So the New Society took the children, and developed a technique for removing the past from people who could not stop carrying it.

Written by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson as a companion to the podcast Within the Wires, it stands entirely on its own: a quiet, controlled alternate history told by a narrator whose account of her own complicity is the thing being examined.