The Memory Police Audiobook By Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder - translator cover art

The Memory Police

A Novel

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The Memory Police

By: Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder - translator
Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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About this listen

2019 National Book Award Finalist

Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize and the 2020 Translated Book Award

New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

©2019 Yoko Ogawa and Stephen Snyder (P)2019 Random House Audio
Dystopian Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Island Emotionally Gripping Heartfelt Thought-Provoking Mind-Bending Feel-Good

Critic reviews

"An elegantly spare dystopian fable.... Reading The Memory Police is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness.... Ogawa’s ruminant style captures the alienation of being alive as the world’s ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend." (The New York Times Book Review)

"The Memory Police is a masterpiece: a deep pool that can be experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination. It is a novel that makes us see differently, opening up its ideas in inconspicuous ways, knowing that all moments of understanding and grace are fleeting. It is political and human, it makes no promises. It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision.... [It] reaches English-language readers as if sent from the future." (The Guardian)

"A masterful work of speculative fiction.... An unforgettable literary thriller full of atmospheric horror." (Chicago Tribune)

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