
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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Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.
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Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
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It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
- By: Anne de Marcken
- Narrated by: Jessica Preddy
- Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.
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The manner of which this book was written
- By Vanessa on 03-31-25
By: Anne de Marcken
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Weather
- A Novel
- By: Jenny Offill
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 3 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives.
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Read This Article Before Listening to Weather
- By MOR Denver on 04-28-20
By: Jenny Offill
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The Unit
- By: Ninni Holmqvist
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Dorrit Wegner turned fifty, the government transferred her to a state-of-the-art facility where she can live out her days in comfort. Her apartment is furnished to her tastes, her meals expertly served, and all at the very reasonable non-negotiable price of one cardiopulmonary system. Once an outsider without family, derided by a society bent on productivity, Dorrit finds within The Unit the company of kindred spirits and a dignity conferred by 'use' in medical tests.
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Makes you think
- By Sylvia on 01-30-11
By: Ninni Holmqvist
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The Hole
- By: Hiroko Oyamada
- Narrated by: Brianna Ishibashi
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws, and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: She makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.
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Murakami-esque in much except its brevity
- By TiffanyD on 01-29-21
By: Hiroko Oyamada
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Several People Are Typing
- A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club)
- By: Calvin Kasulke
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Neil Shah, Dani Martineck, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm, has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels - at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from-home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from...wherever he says he is. Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his coworker Pradeep to help him escape and to find out what happened to his body.
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Spooky, funny, surprisingly touching
- By TD on 11-03-23
By: Calvin Kasulke
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Out
- A Novel
- By: Natsuo Kirino
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plot's ringleader but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society.
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Out...
- By Christopher on 06-24-16
By: Natsuo Kirino
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Convenience Store Woman
- By: Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori - translator
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tokyo resident Keiko Furukara has never fit in - neither in her family, nor in school - but when at the age of 18 she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of national convenience store chain Smile Mart, she realizes instantly that she has found her purpose in life. Delighted to be able to exist in a place where the rules of social interaction are crystal clear (many are laid out line-by-line in the store's manual), Keiko does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and mode of speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a "normal" person excellently, more or less.
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Am amazing and different story
- By D.R. on 04-10-19
By: Sayaka Murata, and others
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Never Let Me Go
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
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Be patient; it will pay off
- By Kc on 05-23-05
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
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The Cloven Viscount
- Translated by Archibald Colquhoun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
By: Italo Calvino
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Mrs. S
- By: K Patrick
- Narrated by: Katherine Littrell
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a butch antipodean outsider arrives to take up the antiquated role of “matron.” Within this landscape of immense privilege, where difference is met with hostility, the matron finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body.
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Extraordinary
- By Jackson Theofore Keys on 06-29-23
By: K Patrick
An unexpected pleasure
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Interesting dystopian take, not so thrilling
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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.
Sad but Beautiful
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Underwhelming
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Meh
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Beautiful and haunting
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Intriguing Read.
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A dystopian world where everything seems to disappear one by one. It was a sad and slow book.
A book about forgetting
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Murakami without the misogyny
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Sad and perfect
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