
The Memory Police
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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...




















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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An unexpected pleasure
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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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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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Murakami without the misogyny
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Sad and perfect
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