Matt Greene‘s “utterly haunting” (Chicago Review of Books) dystopia The Definitions has just been spotlighted by YouTube book reviewer Kirstyn Benson:

“I never see anyone talking about The Definitions by Matt Greene and it needs to be talked about more.”

Watch her full review on YouTube shorts here.

The Centre is a place of rehabilitation and rebuilding. Students arrive nameless, their memories and sense of identity wiped by a strange illness.

Daily, they attend classes that will help them re-learn the right ways to speak and live; they practise the roles they’ll assume once graduated and returned to society, and pursue their true and authentic selves. In their free time, they negotiate a burgeoning social hierarchy and watch old cartridges together, replete with characters who consolidate their own identities and whose names they adopt: Maria, Chandler, Chino, Gunther…

But as the programme continues, fragments of memories threaten to disrupt the curriculum: memories of walking down supermarket aisles, of playing in an arcade, of stroking a dog in a field. Are these recollections real, or a symptom of lingering disease? How do such visions fit with the identities the Students have built for themselves?

With graduation approaching, it’s clear that some Students are not on track. And so, is it time to ask: what happens if you are silent when it’s your turn to speak? what if you are not as people say you are? And how do you describe something that sits between two meanings?

Matt Greene’s The Definitions is out now in the UK and the US. Grab your UK copy here or, better, via your local bookstore or bookshop.org.

Follow Matt Greene on Bluesky @arealmattgreene.bsky.social.