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Completing my Clare North glom. This is exploring the same theme to which North returns in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and The Sudden Appearance of Hope, the question of being unmoored from other people's memories and your own identity, but this time from the other side, as it were.

Kepler is a ghost who can possess bodies by touching them. They don't get memories, just the body. So ghosts live a basically parasitic existence, stealing bodies and money; making people's bodies commit murder and then dumping them to face theconsequences; snatching someone's body if the one you're in is dying; living in one for 30 years, having a family, then bailing out and leaving the 20-year-old original owner in an old man's cancer-riddled shell, that sort of thing. Kepler is a monster, in fact, as are all the ghosts, but this existence is the only one they have and most of them don't want to die. (If the body dies with them in, that's it.)

The story is about Kepler running for their life from an organisation dedicated to destroying ghosts, which turns out to have been infiltrated by one of the worst ones. It's inevitably hard not to sympathise with Kepler, what with them being the viewpoint character (Kepler never discloses if they were originally male or female or what) and we can believe that Kepler has come to love the bodies they possess (and has even groped their way to a policy of consensual possession and 'leave it better than you found it') when not exploiting others in a desperate effort to survive. Kepler's efforts to form human connections--necessarily temporary--are tragic and pathetic and moving all together, and it's a fascinating read, if a very dark one.