Totally unlike anything I have ever read. Totally absorbing and fantastically executed. I can't wait to see what Guy Morphuss does next.

Five Minds is a fast-paced murder mystery thriller with elements of Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and Westworld throughout. In a future where overpopulation is being controlled by limiting lifespans. If you want a longer life, you can opt in to a commune - five minds in one body. Each mind gets four hours at a time, but the combined lifespan of the five is 150 years as opposed to the usual 80. After 25 years together, one commune wants to buy upgrades for their next host and travel to a dangerous place where one of the commune accepts a dangerous offer and another disappears. Could one of the commune be trying to kill the others? This is one twisted, wild rollercoaster ride. Highly recommended!

A brilliantly inventive thriller. Completely gripped me from the start and by the end, I think my own mind had split in 5. Can't wait to see what this author does next.

An impressive sci-fi thriller debut. Think Agatha Christie's 'And Then There None', then add a touch of Logan's Run and Westworld.
In the future, to control the Earth's natural resources, Five individual Minds can inhabit one body, in a commune known as a 'schizo'. Each personality exists independently from the others for four hours a day. But then things start to go wrong and one of them disappears. Is someone trying to kill them off? An exciting high concept tale that will keep you guessing.

In his play "No Exit", Jean-Paul Sartre devised the concept of "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or "Hell is other people". Am sure given the different global lockdowns over the past few years there are a lot of people who agree with this. But just imagine if instead of a few weeks, you had to spend eternity with those people < existential silent cat scream >.

The thought of spending eternity trapped in a shared body with 5 other minds makes me very twitchy and uncomfortable, and that was before I read this book. Post-reading thoughts confirms: YEP, definite existential hellscape. That's a big old NOPE from me. I'll take the void for my choice of afterlife please.

Five Minds was smart, slick and engaging. A definite page turner that gives you that tingling at the base of your skull where you know something is off but you don't have enough information or clues to work it out just yet, so you just have to go along for the ride.

Was a bit disappointed with the ending. I wanted furious righteous anger and vengeance and instead all I can do is gnash my teeth and flail my fists at the ceiling and shout "NOOOOOO!!! #$%^&*!!". Would definitely be keen to read more stories set in this unsettling dystopia.

Recommended for fans of Blake Crouch, Michael Crichton, Jeremy Robinson, Stuart Turton

Thank you to Netgalley and Viper publishing for the copy.

This wasn’t a book I would normally choose, but I felt like reading something different and this was definitely that. This was a sci-fi / crime mash up in a future you could almost imagine coming true. As human’s health becomes better we are all living longer. This is great for individuals but not for the state as people living longer means using more resources and something has to change. Can a time limit be put on life? If no one lives over the age of eighty the world can sustain it’s population. The flyer for a Death Park was an ingenious opener that tells you straight away the sort of world you’re entering. I felt a certain kinship with Squid Game here - not that I’ve watched much, because I don’t like watching violence. I did smile though at the terms and conditions of this park and what might happen to you inside it’s gates. This is not Alton Towers!

The only way to continue living is extreme. People can choose to live as a commune - but not the sort you imagine. This is not everyone living in one space, but five separate entities living inside one of their bodies. In this case Alex, Sierra, Kate, Ben and Mike live inside Mike’s body and have co-existed for 25 years. It’s like the ultimate Big Brother, held inside one person. This idea was unique and so awful that I had to stop and think for a moment. My brain is pretty noisy as it is, and I’m only one person. How could one body cope with the constant clamour of five people? Is Mike the executive entity since everyone is living in his body or does everyone have a say? I wanted to know whether people could choose who lived inside them, to gather people whose views and outlook are aligned with yours. Or are you simply allotted a number and and assigned to a group? This was such an awful idea I was simultaneously repulsed and intrigued. How the hell had this worked for 25 years?! You could be sharing your body with someone you hate, even worse they could be a murderer.

Every five years, a ‘commune’ can enter games at the Death Park. The incentive is to play a game that wins them extra time, which they can use to find a new host body if their own is wearing out. Of course the downside is that they may have their time cut short. This is where the book turns into a good, old-fashioned murder mystery. After a game, one of the commune has disappeared. But where? Are they dead? But who did it? Was it a another commune member? This could be an outside or an inside job. This is a brilliant and unique update of every murder mystery where several characters are marooned and slowly picked off one by one. Except here they’re all inside one body. Who will catch the murderer and how will they search.

This is a highly unique and superbly realised debut novel that leaves you thinking about your mortality. If faced with the choices these characters are what would we do? I know I couldn’t live inside a body with others, because I can barely find anyone I can bear to go on holiday with. So I’m left with living the high life but dying at 42. Or would I want to upload my mind into an artificial body - something I’ve occasionally wished for as someone with a chronic degenerative illness. This is an intelligent and original dystopian crime thriller and I was glued to every page.

So clever! A brilliantly entertaining, high-concept read - I loved it! I thought it was such a unique, thrilling dystopian story, I can't wait to read what Guy writes next.

Just WOW! and WOW again!

This book had it all for me. Futuristic sci-fi, action, a crime (or two) to solve and an extremely clever plot.

Imagine a future where you have to decide how you wish to live, whether it be in human form as a worker or in an android (andi). Or maybe as a Hed (Hedonist) living a life of luxury but only until you are aged 42. If you want to live for 150 years you can share a body with five other minds and form a commune.

The book centres around a commune in a host body. They've been together for 25 years when we join them. Already my head was pondering the equity and rationale of occupying one body. Each has a set time of day for four hours that they inhabit the body. Although they can express disapproval (and they do) of where or how the previous mind left the body, there's not much they can physically do to stop this. They can only communicate with each other through messages. At one point it did get little long winded as each of them had to let the others know what had happened in their time line. As a reader you already knew so you were waiting for them to catch up with you.

Wanting upgrades for their next host body they go to Death Park, and Alton Towers it is not! It reminded me slightly of the Hunger Games as they begin to play the games in the Death Park. I often find that action can be written so descriptively it's hard to know what is happening, or it is too long winded. Not so with this book. The action scenes are succinct and put you right in the moment. I could vividly see it all playing out in my minds eye.

Not everything is explained at the outset as to how this world works, even the commune aren't sure at times. So just go with it and discover as you read. After all this is an imaginary future world created by the author, and only he knows what is going to happen!

I think I may have just read the book of the year for me and the future Agatha Christie. This story is certainly going to stay with me.

Prior to being asked to review this book, I’d seen a lot of good press circulating on social media. And let me start by telling you Five Minds definitely lives up to the hype it’s already generated. A truly outstanding piece of work, I am jealous of anyone yet to read it! It is original, unnerving, dark and so smart! I honestly can’t believe this is a debut, Guy Morpuss’ writing is exceptional and the concept is extraordinary. I was hooked from the first page and have been recommending it to anyone that will listen. I don’t read a lot of science fiction so I was slightly taken aback at how immersed I was in this storyline.

My one little gripe is I would have liked a little about the 5 minds. Although they are discussed, it took a bit of time to know who was who.

I have so much to say about this book, I want to spill all the details but that would be incredibly bad taste! Basically my short but sweet review is this… WOW, WOW, WOW! Please go pick a copy up, you won’t put it down!

Looking forward to more from this author. Incredible!

Five Minds by Guy Morpuss

In the near future, Earth’s population crisis has been solved through drastic measures. On reaching adulthood, people can select how the rest of their lives will be lived – as a worker in their own bodies, as glamorous and wealthy pleasure-seekers (but for a pitifully short life), as a kind of human-android hybrid. All have their lifespan limited. But, for the longest life, people can opt to share a body – five minds in one body for about 140 years – but with consciousness limited to four hours as each mind takes its turn through the day.

Alex, Kate, Sierra, Ben and Mike have lived together in one body for 25 years. While Mike does everything he can with his time to keep the body fit, others within the commune have treated it less well. The time has come to compete for time credits to buy a new host body. They must play a series of virtual games in the ‘death parks’, places where people play to gain time but so often lose it. But, as the games play out, one of the five goes missing and soon it becomes terribly clear – they have been murdered. Someone wants to kill them off one by one. But who? Could they be sharing a body with a killer?

Five Minds is such an original and clever speculative novel, which takes the concept of a locked room murder mystery to extremes, with some of the suspects confined within one body, and each of the minds using their allotted shift of time to investigate. The chapters move through the structure of the day, moving between the minds, with Alex starting the day. It’s purposefully disjointed with each mind having to readjust to where their predecessor in the body has left them. They can communicate through messages, leaving clues and warnings – or lies and deceits. It’s an intriguing way for a murder enquiry to be conducted.

The science fiction element comes to the fore in the Death Park, a horrendous place of shifting realities and manipulation. Some of the games are frightening, others physically challenging, but the cost can be extreme, even fatal. What a place!

It is a dark novel. There seems no pleasure to be had living in four-hour chunks, in a body that isn’t your own, with the minds of others that you don’t particularly like. What if you’re the one who never sees the sun or even daylight? You can see why few select this course but there is a sadness about the other types of life. The setting of the Death Park seems appropriate to the gloom of a world that has no room for the people who live on it.

Five Minds raises questions about what type of life one might want, what one might be prepared to do to have more time, what time one might give up for a short life of luxury. But it is also an excellent crime novel that goes off in all sorts of unexpected directions. It does get complicated, which you’d expect when nobody has time to see the full picture, and is very clever and satisfying in the way it develops.

This is a book that is so unusual and unique I have no idea where to begin with this gem. This is unlike anything I’ve ever read previously.

This is a dystopian novel which is set in the future where the earth is over populated. This is completely impossible to compare with any other book because I don’t believe that there are any in the same topic area.

This is such a clever plot and I have to say that the author is absolutely genius for coming up with this. However, I also need to send my sympathies as Morpuss has set a really high standard with this book and I don’t know how it will be followed. I am very eager to find out though.

This plot has been so interesting with body sharing and lifespans based on which category you fall into. This is well written and completely engaging whilst unpredictable.

This is a book that I absolutely recommend. I have been left speechless by this one.

(3.5 stars from me)
In this futuristic, dystopian society resources are low and the overpopulation has reached its peak, so to limit the damage, humankind has developed different options for everyone to pick: transfer your mind to an android body, become a worker (closest to our regular lives), become a hedonist with a limited lifespan, or join a commune and become a schizo.

We're following five people who chose to share one body - the latter alternative. The story focuses on a week in their life, 25-years after their fateful decision. We get some flashbacks into their past and the narrative jumps between the five - Kate, Alex, Sierra, Ben and Mike - as each gets their 4 hours of consciousness per day.
Early on into the book, Kate makes a deal with a suspicious android, which starts a series of mysterious events, including a disappearance of one of the five (that no one thought was possible!), near-death misses and some fishy characters demanding answers. Over the course of a week, the commune tries to find out what's happening and why, before anyone else gets killed..

I truly enjoyed the mind-transferring, scrupuleless society concept and the world built by Guy Morpuss. It's quite grim and ruthless, with time being the new currency and the weak and desperate dying in arenas fighting for one more day to live.
I quite enjoyed the main characters and despite jumping between five minds I felt their personalities were quite distinct, but sometimes that disparity felt artificially exaggerated.
I didn't enjoy the random jumps into the past - those shifts took me out of the story and they were not as revelatory as I would have liked.
Finally, the ending was full of tension and the stakes were high, but the reveal did not sit quite right with me. Something about the culprit and his motivations did not convince me.
Overall it was a fun, quite fast-paced, plot driven sci-fi story, so if you want something intriguing and tense, check the Five minds out.

What a unique read! When I was first introduced to this book in a buyers meeting I thought this is not my typical read but I was intrigued by the concept. A Sci-fi thriller! I was so glad I decided to read this book!
It captured my attention from the go and I can so see this as a movie!

The world population is exploding and something needs to be done. The powers to be come up with a plan. You have a choice out of 5.
1- You can choose to be a work where life goes on as it is.
2- The next and very popular choice is to become an Android. This means your mind will be taken out of your body and it will be uploaded into an Android body. An Android can also do anything that a human can do. You don't need to eat or drink and you need little upkeep but on the negative side, you will only have 80 years.
3- The third choice is a hedonist. With this choice, you are given a lot of money, a very nice home and you never have to work in your life but you will only have 25 years to live.
4- The fourth choice (this is the choice that all characters in this book choose) is to join a communal body called schizos. This means that 5 people will live in one body each of them given 25 years in total on earth which means they will not pass on before they are 142. Each person has 4 hours per day where they are in charge of the Host body. They can do extra jobs or take part in games to earn more lives.
5- The fifth and final choice is death.

So what would you choose??

In this story, we meet Kate, Mike, Ben, Sierra and Alex. We very soon realised that something is wrong somewhere; someone is out to get them one by one......
Will they be able to figure it out before they are all gone and why is this happening?

A brilliant and very different read than I can highly recommend!

Thank you to NetGalley and Viper, Profile Books and Serpent's Tail for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion

In a future where resources are limited, 5 people’s consciousness’ can be put into the body of just one. Each person shares the day equally and lives for over 100 years.

Naturally, there are disagreements between the ‘commune’ of people who share a body. After 25 years, the members of one commune enter a ‘death park’ in order to earn time, which they will trade for upgrades on their next host body. Soon it becomes obvious that they are being picked off one by one, but is it by outside sources, or more worryingly, someone within the commune?

The concept of this book is so interesting! You can’t help but wonder what option you would choose for your own life in such a future. The twists and turns kept me interested, and it is cleverly written. I will look for more by this author and highly recommend this book.

Thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for my free advance copy in return for an unbiased review.

Five Minds blew my one and only mind AWAY! Set in a future dystopian type world where the population of people has become a huge problem and a drain on precious resources, when they turn 17 humans are given a number of choices on how they want to live the rest of their lives. Each option has an allocated number of years that the person has to live dependant on how many resources or how useful that type of person will be. Humans can choose to be a worker, a hedonist, an AI, or a commune. Our five protagonists are people who have chosen to live in a commune whereby they all live in the same body and each mind takes turns being 'conscious' for 4 hours per day. Each mind doesn't know what the others know or did or felt and their only way of communicating with each other is by leaving messages. One of the minds disappears and the others can't understand why or how but they start to suspect that one of the others is to blame. Then they notice bizarre things starting to happen in one of the death parks where people can go to compete against others in virtual challenges in an attempt to win their remaining years of life from them. The loser of the game dies. Cue a disjointed and dangerous investigation where no one knows who to trust in this genius mix of sci-fi and thriller genres.
All the online gaming and virtual reality stuff gave me Ready Player One vibes but the commune and AI aspects gave it such a fantastic unique twist. I really liked how the author managed to make it so that the ending wasn't super obvious from the start despite us as readers being able to know what all the minds were doing and thinking. I think I pretty much ended up having suspected each of the five by the time the reveal came along ha ha ha.... I also really liked how each of the five were very distinct which made it easy to transition from one perspective to another and to understand why they behaved the way they did and the decisions they made.
I genuinely loved this book far more than I had thought I would. I was excited to get back to it each day and was a bit sad when it ended. And speaking of endings, this did not end the way that I thought it would. I would never have guessed that ending but it felt just right.

The world is a different place.
We can now choose how we live, through the use of artificial intelligence. Kate, Alex, Ben, Mike and Sierra all choose to live as a commune in one body.

Battle Royale meets The Matrix

Total Mind Blown!!!

The concept and narrative are brilliant and unique, with each chapter keeping you on your toes and constantly guessing.

I had guessed the villain, but due to Morpuss' writing of misleading, I actually second-guessed myself and guessed it was someone else.

I slightly expected a different ending because of the constant twists and bluffs but that was my fault; after all, it has to end somewhere.

I have recommended this book to soo many people and this is definitely hitting one of my favourites for 2021!!

Wow…that was a breakneck rollercoaster ride!!

Five Minds by Guy Morpuss is his debut novel and what a debut it is!! The book takes a fresh view on a not so far dystopian future where we have depleted the planets resources and those coming of age at 17 year olds have a difficult decision to make in relation to their future lifestyle and subsequent life-span. Our MC’s make the choice to become a Commune where five minds are transposed into one body and you live for 142 years, but each person only gets to live for 4 hours each day.

Mix into this a murder mystery within this commune and you have a very entertaining read. Guy’s writing style is very captivating and he develops each character exceptionally. He also adds in the concept of ‘Death Parks’ where you have the ability to extend and unfortunately shorten your lifespan depending on the outcome of the challenges presented in death games (think ‘The Running Man’). This is where the story between the 5 characters unfolds, as does the murder mystery.

The story runs at a million miles an hour where you just don’t want it to stop. Each revelation changes your direction of thought until the explosive ending. This book packs in all the action you want and need from a sci-fi thriller. This is one of my favourite reads so far this year as it ticks every box:
✓ Innovative dystopian concept
✓ Science Fiction
✓ Edge of your seat thriller
✓ A murder mystery which has you guessing right until the very last pages

Read this as soon as you can, you will not regret it! I cannot wait until this author publishes his next book…I can see him scaling my favourite authors list very quickly.

Where to start with Five Minds? How to explain Five Minds? This is an absolute belter of a crime story. It’s high concept, cleverly constructed and has all the tension and thrills I want from my murder stories.

But it’s a bit “different” with Five Minds sharing a body, all taking an alloted time to live while the other Minds are dormant and waiting for their allocated time to roll around again. So readers have five main characters to get to know and we learn they can only communicate with each other by leaving messages for the other people inhabiting their body. Guy Morpuss explains it so much more effectively in the book and being able to see what Kate, Mike, Sienna, Alex and Ben are telling each other allows the reader to understand the dynamics of each character.

Although big decisions need to be made by unanimous vote (thus taking 24 hours) sometimes snap decisions are needed and the Mind which makes that choice has to hope the others agree. This takes conflicted main character to a whole new level!

In Five Minds our commune of Minds are in danger, a synthetic lifeform has challenged Kate to a game. The prize is more time (time is lifetime and everyone can trade some of their hours to prolong their lifespan). Kate has no time to consult the others so agrees to the android’s challenge and from here our Five are in danger. Someone, for reasons they don’t know, is trying to kill each of the Minds within the body.

Within the world where Five Minds is set are game zones. The desperate souls who are reaching the end of their lives can play in the games to try to win more time. Fail and it’s an early death. Our Five must play these games and Guy Morpuss has devised some absorbing challenges for them. The games are physical challenges, there are moral and reasoning dilemma scenarios to navigate or problem solving challenges to overcome. Failure isn’t an option but what happens if a third party is trying to rig the odds against you?

Five Minds is quite unlike anything else. A murder tale in a fantasy reality and obviously this may not appeal to everybody. But if you pass on this excellent book then it will be your loss – how refreshing to have something so wonderfully different to enjoy. Embrace the unusual and go with it.

It’s less and less common these days – especially when you read a lot – to find books that are nothing like anything else you’ve read, so a hearty well done to Viper Books for finding Five Minds, which is brilliantly unique.

There are elements of lots of things in this book – dystopian fiction, crime fiction and even a brief foray into romance at one point – but these elements blend really well to make a dark and compelling thriller.

The concept of having each part of the story furthered by each member of the commune works really well, especially as we can assume that one of them is unreliable, but we don’t know who – there are clues of course but sifting the reality from the whopping red herrings is incredibly challenging!

Part of the book that really struck me what that there is little information about how the world is living outside of the death park that the characters find themselves in – there is a flashback section which takes place outside the park but, in the main, we have to imagine for ourselves. This works quite well, as the events of the book are then much more immediate and not bogged down in pages and pages of description bringing you up-to-date on what the places we might know are like for these characters now.

You do, however, get a great sense of the death park and the people within it, and the games that the characters are forced to play to earn time credit are brilliantly thought out – I would assume that Guy Morpuss is a fan of the cryptic crossword…

This book is imaginative and vivid – I was gripped by it and recommended it to my friend when I had only read the blurb. It’s quite remarkable for a debut novel and I’ll definitely be looking out for more from Guy Morpuss in future.

I’m not a big reader of speculative fiction but I was so intrigued by the concept of Five Minds that I couldn’t resist giving it a go – and I’m so glad I did because it is truly a thrilling and fascinating ride. The story takes place in the not so distant (if the world continues the way it is) future where lifespans have a fixed expiration date and at the age of 17 humans must make one of four choices about how they live. Of these choices the rarest is a commune which essentially involves five minds sharing one body, each allotted four hours a day. We follow one such commune with whom things have gotten complicated after one of the commune members disappears under suspicious circumstances.

I loved Five Minds – it is like nothing else I’ve read and the whole premise and execution of the plot is masterfully done. The structure worked particularly well, each commune member only has four hours each to live and cannot communicate directly with one another – so they interact via messages. These messages paint a fascinating picture of how these five human beings ended up sharing a body and how they feel about each other. The idea of someone else being in control of what feels like your body and only being able to rely on what they tell you about their actions whilst they are in charge is frightening but immensely intriguing. I don’t want to say much about the intricacies of the plot because it is best experienced for yourself but the way events unfold is a gripping and immersive journey. Five Minds is original, dark, fast paced, clever and satisfyingly twisty. A brilliant debut!