The Revisionists

"The past was gone." When Zed's wife and daughter die in a car accident, the government gives him two months to mourn. Then agents appear at his apartment and remove all trace of them—their pictures and clothing, computer files, his daughter's teddy bear. They even take the clothing his wife had bought him. Zed lives in a world that is traumatized by memories of a terrifying past and determined to prevent that past from occurring again. Through time travel, Zed is sent back to our present time to ensure that nobody gets in the way of a soon-to-happen conflagration that ultimately leads to his own amnesiac future. This is either a novel about a horrifying future in which dissent is crushed before it starts and history is altered to fit the present, or an equally horrific present in which corporate interests and lawmakers collude and the apparatus of enforcement is progressively outsourced. Maybe it's about both.