The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

My name is Hope Arden. I am the girl the world forgets.

It started when I was sixteen years old. 

A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger.

No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit - you will never remember who I am.

That makes my life tricky. It also makes me dangerous . . .

Interesting story idea, compelling read.  The secondary storyline of a sinister mobile application called “Perfection”, which accumulates millions of minute behavioural, financial, and relationship data points about its users and trains them to modify their behaviour — to the extent of becoming a completely different person — in the pursuit of personal perfection was also very interesting and I could see the possibility.

The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson-Ellis

Fiftyish Margaret Penny returns to cold and secretive Edinburgh after some unspecified failures in London. She camps in the box room of her mother, who is not especially glad to see her. She takes a dead-end job looking for information to identify indigents who die without relatives or documentation. Her first "client," an old woman found frozen to death in an unheated flat, intrigues her, and before long her search has taken her back to London. 

By jumping around in her flashback sections, and suggesting a family history involving madwomen in the attic, a nefarious family business, illegitimate children, crooked lawyers, nude paintings commissioned by a rich patron from a dying artist, and the strange appearance and disappearance of a ruby brooch, Paulson-Ellis keeps her readers guessing.  

There was a bit too much jumping around in the timeline and the end was unsatisfying.  As the reader you worked out how everyone was related, but the main character, who was doing all the investigating, never found out.

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo

In 1930s colonial Malaya, a dissolute British doctor receives a surprise gift of an eleven-year-old Chinese houseboy. Sent as a bequest from an old friend, young Ren has a mission: to find his dead master's severed finger and reunite it with his body. Ren has forty-nine days, or else his master's soul will roam the earth forever. 

Ji Lin, an apprentice dressmaker, moonlights as a dancehall girl to pay her mother's debts. One night, Ji Lin's dance partner leaves her with a gruesome souvenir that leads her on a crooked, dark trail. 

As time runs out for Ren's mission, a series of unexplained deaths occur amid rumours of tigers who turn into men. In their journey to keep a promise and discover the truth, Ren and Ji Lin's paths will cross in ways they will never forget.

A very interesting story that kept me entertained, but not compelling to pick up if I got distracted by something else.  It was great to see the names of places we went through when travelling and the mention of foods we tried and saw.