Note: This review contains thematic and basic plot details for "The Sudden Appearance of Hope," but is written to avoid spoiling the book.

Claire North's "The Sudden Appearance of Hope" is a novel with an argument to make about smartphone apps and online identity.

Maybe that's not immediately interesting to readers bored of navel-gazing worry-pieces about smartphones, but North isn't here to lecture you or rehash tired debates. Instead, she's produced something that feels at the same time absent and necessary: Smart, compelling fiction about this future that asks us to outsource ever-larger chunks of our selves to the cloud.

The story lives in a slightly altered version of our reality. There are giddy whispers of a hot new app, called Perfection. It's a sort of FitBit-Facebook-Yelp hybrid, gobbling GPS, activity, personal, and bank account data from its users' phones and spitting out affirmation and recommendations.

Eat less of this, more of that. Work out at this gym. Get your teeth whitened. Forget your lazy habits. Worry less. Smile more. Find a boyfriend, a wife, a husband. Charm everyone.

Users who follow its advice collect achievement points. As Perfection spreads, large point counts become increasingly important status symbols. Added up, they lead to a kind of nirvana of the public, quantified self — even as it slowly erasing everything that defines its users as individuals.

Slipping invisibly through that creeping dystopia is North's protagonist, the globe-trotting thief Hope Arden.

Hope has a superpower that, like most interesting superpowers, is also a curse: No one who meets her can remember her. Cameras can take her picture, people can write down or record her words. But the people with her in those photos and sitting across from her as she speaks remember themselves being alone.

That ability makes Hope the perfect foil for a world where your identity gets rendered in increasingly indelible digital ink. I found myself reading her story as an escapist fantasy, even as she recounts waking up in her childhood bedroom to discover her parents no longer have any idea who she is. How nice it would be to disappear permanently from the grid, dissociate your profiles, ad clicks, and online rambling from anyone's memory of a real person. Imagine saying something dumb in a conversation (or, for that matter, robbing a bank) and walking away knowing it would be instantly forgotten. The only consequences for Hope are in her own self-judgment.

Those few people who discover Hope's existence come to fear her. Desperate to fix her in their minds they write her name down, repeat it to themselves in mantras, reflexively check photos of her on their phones. "There is a girl you do not remember," more than one character scribbles in a notebook.

It's uncomfortable, as a reader, to recognize yourself in these characters' anxieties.

We live in a world where everyone you meet has an online profile. Meet someone in a bar and you're just a few clicks away from intimate knowledge of their inner lives, work histories, and bad Tweets. Anonymity is suspicious and scary.

There is a girl you do not remember.

When North throws Hope into the middle of a conflict between Perfection and its shadowy enemies, she forces you to take a side. The quantified, endlessly profiled, advertised-to, Instagram-filtered, and unforgettable self: for or against?

There's enormous cruelty, greed, and paranoia in this story — as well as horrible, graphic violence — but this is by far its most unnerving element.

But North doesn't let you settle comfortably into technophobia. Even as Perfection's database slowly eats up the world, we see through Hope the corrosive, grinding loneliness of living outside it. How far would you be willing to go to be forgotten? the story asks. And once forgotten: How far would you be willing to go to be remembered?

Reading this story, I found myself hyper-aware of every Tweet, Facebook post, and personal data point I created. The book made me feel uneasy with the sanitized version of myself I quantify and perform for the world, and with the question of what would happen if I dropped off the net entirely. And it makes no effort to resolve that uneasiness.

Though "A Sudden Appearance of Hope" is a novel about heavy ideas, North largely avoids letting them weigh the story down. Hope is a fascinating, fully-realized character before she is a metaphor. And her journey through five continents, the dark web, and the brutal world of corporate espionage makes for an intensely compelling adventure.

"A Sudden Appearance of Hope," published by Orbit, will be released May 17, 2016.