The Memory Police
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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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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I Couldn't Love You More
- A Novel
- By: Esther Freud
- Narrated by: Niamh Cusack
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
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A sweeping story of three generations of women, crossing from London to Ireland and back again, and the enduring effort to retrieve the secrets of the past.
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The Eighth Detective
- A Novel
- By: Alex Pavesi
- Narrated by: Emilia Fox
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
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Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked all the rules out – and wrote seven perfect detective stories to demonstrate. But that was 30 years ago. Now Grant lives in seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island, counting the rest of his days. Until Julia Hart, a brilliant, ambitious editor knocks on his door. Julia wishes to republish his book, and together they must revisit those old stories: An author hiding from his past and an editor keen to understand it.
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GOING IN MY TOP 10!!
- By Shaelyn on 08-07-20
By: Alex Pavesi
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Light Years
- By: James Salter
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.
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Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes
- By W Perry Hall on 04-18-19
By: James Salter
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Two Crosses
- Secrets of the Cross, Book 1
- By: Elizabeth Musser
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
The glimmering Huguenot cross she so innocently wears leads her deep into the shadows. When Gabriella Madison arrives in the French village of Castelnau in 1961 to continue her university studies, she doesn’t anticipate being drawn into the secretive world behind the Algerian war for independence from France. And the further she delves into the war efforts, the more her faith is challenged. The people who surround her bring a whirlwind of transforming forces.
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Faith, Romance, Spies, and Fascinating History
- By Amazon Customer on 05-02-19
By: Elizabeth Musser
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Greenglass House
- By: Kate Milford
- Narrated by: Ben Levin
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
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It’s wintertime at Greenglass House. The creaky smuggler’s inn is always quiet during this season, and 12-year-old Milo, the innkeepers’ adopted son, plans to spend his holidays relaxing. But on the first icy night of vacation, out of nowhere, the guest bell rings. Then rings again. And again....
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A magical mystery with twists and heart
- By Jane Pearl on 02-13-22
By: Kate Milford
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The Last Carolina Girl
- By: Meagan Church
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For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is worlds away from the harsh realities of the day. Loyal to her lumberjack father, she knows only of the familiarity of her small community, the magic of the natural world, and the creative intuition that prompts her to march to the beat of her own drum. But when an accident takes her father's life, leaving her an orphan, Leah finds herself cast into a family of strangers whose welcoming façade hides a terrible secret.
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WOW
- By Savannah Brown on 06-10-23
By: Meagan Church
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
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Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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All for Nothing
- By: Walter Kempowski, Anthea Bell - translator, Jenny Erpenbeck - introduction
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat, and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish 12-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors - a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee.
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All for Nothing
- By Lynn on 03-16-19
By: Walter Kempowski, and others
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The Library of Legends
- A Novel
- By: Janie Chang
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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China, 1937: When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, 19-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of more than 100 students, faculty, and staff must walk 1,000 miles to the safety of China’s western provinces, a journey marred by hunger, cold, and the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the student refugees who are at risk: Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure, a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends.
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Wonderful and Umique!
- By D. Fields on 02-18-22
By: Janie Chang
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The Traitor
- By: V.S. Alexander
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the summer of 1942, as war rages across Europe, a series of anonymous leaflets appears around the University of Munich, speaking out against escalating Nazi atrocities. The leaflets are hidden in public places, or mailed to addresses selected at random from the phone book. Natalya Petrovich, a student, knows who is behind the leaflets - a secret group called the White Rose, led by siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends. As a volunteer nurse on the Russian front, Natalya witnessed the horrors of war first-hand. She willingly enters the White Rose's circle....
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Not all the Germans are guilty.
- By Judy Harley on 09-18-20
By: V.S. Alexander
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The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
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After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together, their fates become intertwined as they work side-by-side at this Sisyphean task.
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What listeners say about The Memory Police
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- elizabeth
- 07-13-24
An unexpected pleasure
Not the typical book, I'd read what I really truly enjoyed it. Even the narration was pleasing after my trip to Japan. I've been reading more books from japanese authors.
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- Thomas J. Lee
- 07-20-22
Interesting dystopian take, not so thrilling
I feel like what I got from this was a serene depiction of a dystopian world clamping down gradually. It was a new take on the genre for me but I did not find it that interesting. I feel like the focus was more on the constant and gradual experience of decline as experienced by very very stoic characters. I didn’t get the satisfaction of learning about any of the whys of the story, though I admit that the pattern of the story is established early enough where that doesn’t come as a huge surprise.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Charles Joseph
- 01-25-23
Sad but Beautiful
I read this on a recommendation. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but it was a truly brilliant book. Even the story within the story, as parts of the book are excerpts from a novel the MC is writing throughout the book, is achingly haunting.
The main story is told from the perspective of an unnamed woman living on an island where their memories of objects are “disappeared” (so thoroughly forgotten that they cannot be recognized for what they are even when plainly visible) and there is a group called the Memory Police that hunt down people who are unaffected by the disappearance of memories. The book follows the MC as she deals with several tribulations caused by the lost memories, including trying to resist the disappearance or even recover things that were disappeared.
Though there are highs and lows, there is always a thread of sadness and growing loss throughout the book. The author is quite good at making the prose emotionally weighty and making the people in the story feel real.
The only thing I can criticize is that it took me out a bit that is that the disappearances and the memory police themselves often felt inconsistent and underexplained. It’s has a fable like quality that just kind of expects you to roll with the unrealistic aspects. The book isn’t about the disappearances and the memory police, it’s about how the MC reacts to them. The whys of how they exist are insignificant to the story being told.
Anyway, the long and short is that the book is incredibly depressing in the most beautiful way and I loved it.
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- Katey Davis
- 03-02-24
Underwhelming
I enjoy dystopian stories a great deal, But it was with this book that I came to realize, I enjoy having a why behind why things are the way they are in the story. Or, even if I don't get a why, I enjoy the characters exploring and unwinding the how behind the way things work in these stories. There is no how or why in this story, just a long tail of how different characters are suffering in their different ways. Mone of the characters were interested in getting out, dismantling the powers that be, or even talking about how they got there. If you like long winded tales about people who have given up, then this is the book for you.
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- Joe
- 03-05-24
Meh
I love dystopian stories and sad endings but I felt nothing towards the characters, only Don and the old man. I don't even remember if anyone but the dog was named. I get the parallels between the novelist's story and the main story but when I would zone out I couldn't figure out which story I was listening to. It felt bland. also what happened to R's wife and kid?? I get the idea, and maybe a lot is lost in translation, but it fell flat for me.
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- Jessica Glazier
- 09-08-23
Beautiful and haunting
This was a very thoughtful and sad read but well worth it. Do not go into it expecting an exciting story and you won’t be disappointed.
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- Mike Jones
- 03-03-24
Intriguing Read.
Creative and thought-provoking. For fans of Diary of Anne Frank. Great for book clubs. Utopian genre.
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- Gerry Levine
- 08-28-19
Strange, atmospheric and deeply troubling
What if dementia was inflicted upon us through an autocratic order manipulating society using neurosciences. What if all we knew and valued in our world was gradually stolen from our memories so it no longer existed for us. WhT would we be?
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3 people found this helpful
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- R. Sedor
- 10-08-20
Melancholy and thought provoking
I liked so much the tone. The characters move through the novel trying not to live into the dystopian future. I cannot stop thinking about the questions it raised for me.
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- Erin Cline
- 05-31-22
beautiful, sad story
the book itself is very good - a great magical realism novel - but i especially enjoyed the performance and the way the novel within the novel is presented. would definitely recommend.
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