Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, the highly-anticipated debut novel by Yiming Ma, which will be published by Mariner Books in the US and McClelland & Stewart in Canada on August 12, 2025. You can pre-order here in US or here in Canada.
“When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me stories of a world before memories could be shared between strangers…“
In a far-off future ruled by the Qin Empire, every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank, an intracranial device capable of recording and transmitting memories between minds. This technology gives birth to Memory Capitalism, where anyone with means can relive the life experiences of others. It also unleashes opportunities for manipulation: memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain.
After the sudden passing of his mother, an unnamed narrator inherits a collection of banned memories from her Mindbank so dangerous that even possessing them places his freedom in jeopardy. Traversing genres, empires, and millennia, they are tales of sumo wrestlers and social activists and armless swimmers and watchmakers, struggling amid the backdrop of Qin’s ascent toward global dominance. Determined to release his mother’s memories to the world before they are destroyed forever, the narrator will risk everything—even if the cost is his own life.
Powerful and provocative, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us masterfully explores how governments and media manipulate history to control the collective imagination. It forces us to see beyond the sheen of convenient truths and to unearth real stories of sacrifice and love that refuse to be eradicated.
Here is the cover, designed by Ploy Siripant.
Yiming Ma: “At the beginning of the cover process, I must admit that I was nervous. Within the literary community, legends of well-known and debut authors alike digging their heels in and ending up in a quarrel with their publishers about their book cover are plentiful, and I dreaded that nightmare. Worse, I did not anticipate that my book would be a simple cover to design. Since These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is a constellation novel consisting of twelve radically discrete narratives written in twelve different styles, I had no idea how my brave cover designer might achieve such a feat. In my imagination, I saw a zodiac of motifs from each Memory Epic (i.e. a sumo wrestler, a vintage Patek perpetual, an AI Angel) – then lamented how inevitably crowded that cover might appear.
With her first swing, Ploy knocked it out of the park. Although there were multiple covers that the Mariner team presented, I immediately knew which one my brilliant US and Canadian editors were going to sell me on, remembering from the margins of my manuscript how they had both marked the Chrysanthemum motif as indelible, stemming from a critical scene in which the yellow flower blooms from the deceased body of a beloved character.
I love how the central Chrysanthemum, a vibrant flower often associated with death and grief in Asian cultures, explodes into a phantasmagoria of yellow, green, brown and white pixels, often overlapping in mosaic patterns. Ploy’s extraordinary cover truly does justice to the multitude of styles and stories in the novel, equally evoking the bittersweet nature of beauty with the speculative, technological and dystopian elements of the book like a true master of her craft.
Along our journey, Ploy and I did play with adding the Chinese translation of the title (inspired by Ed Park’s astounding cover for Same Bed, Different Dreams), but we ultimately decided to prioritize clarity and frankly, leave some space for advance praise. Instead, we honed in on smaller details: a deeper arch of the stem to symbolize the weight of the book’s themes, but not so much that a reader might worry that there was little hope to be found in this novel centered on love, survival and humanity; a browning of the leaves; the impossible task of finding harmony in the chaotic beauty of the pixel dispersion.
The final note I’ll add, which I’m not even sure Ploy knows, is that I struggled deeply with whether to use my real name for the publication of These Memories Do Not Belong to Us. That’s a story for another time, but despite my affection for my birth country, and the fact that my book is fiction, there is always the risk of misinterpretation by Western media. But in the end, I decided to have faith in my readers, believing that they would recognize my novel’s themes to be universal, no matter how devastating.”
Ploy Siripant: “I was instantly drawn to this novel because of its title, and frankly I asked to work on it! I loved how long and lyrical it was, and knew that typography needed to be a prominent design element on the cover.
Once I delved into the extraordinary stories, the Chrysanthemum stood out as the perfect motif. My goal was to convey the nostalgic memories and dystopian future within one image, so I started playing around with different treatments on vintage botanical drawings: the yellow flower immediately evoked a strong connection to Chinese and Asian cultures. And the pixel dispersion effect was the perfect solution to expressing the speculative technology in the book and tying all the elements eloquently back to the title.
I was thrilled that Yiming resonated with the cover on the first pass! With his thoughtful feedback, I made some tweaks to push the design, like replacing what was originally a soft yellow sky with the more metallic background in the final version.
I am so happy with where we landed, and to have played a part in such a timely and compelling novel.”
