Memory Piece

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What to expect

The award-winning author of The Leavers offers a visionary novel of friendship, art, and ambition that asks: What is the value of a meaningful life?

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. "Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves," they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.

By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet's early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighbourhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Moving from the pre-digital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

(P) 2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

Ko has brought us one of those rare, sumptuous tales of art and friendship that feels both universal and inimitable.
Elle
A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York's art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.
Vogue
There's no doubting Ko's talent . . . this epic is never less than engaging line by line.
Daily Mail
Ambitious . . . [Ko] writes with a cool, collected intelligence and is unafraid to wrangle big ideas.
Observer
Gritty and refreshingly girl-centric . . . It documents the last days of people being untrackable, able to disappear, and for this alone lingers in the imagination.
New York Times
A sharp novel that spans the past, present and future of a friendship.
TIME
A touching story . . . Like her previous book, The Leavers, it's sure to become a modern classic.
Press Association
Remarkable . . . vividly captures the urgency of youth, and becomes a heartbreaking elegy for a communal, almost utopian approach to urban life.
Rumaan Alam, author of LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND
A group portrait of three women who wrest meaning from a world that is closing down around them, Memory Piece is bright with defiance, intelligence and stubborn love. To spend time with these characters is a gift.
C Pam Zhang, author of HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD
Evocative and luminous. Ko once again introduces us to people we want to know deeply, then as always, delivers that and beyond. A glorious writer.
Jacqueline Woodson, author of RED AT THE BONE
Wild and wonderful, punk and propulsive, Memory Piece is about three friends growing from girlhood into a sinister new world. It is about authenticity, surveillance, capitalism, queerness, and the internet. It is about-it is-everything.
Julia Phillips, author of THE DISAPPEARING EARTH
Dazzlingly inventive and knowing, Memory Piece is a bold and affecting novel about resistance, solidarity, and friendship.
Dana Spiotta, author of EAT THE DOCUMENT
An urgent book that asks you to reflect on moments that feel definite but are actually transient, which is a real gift. Beautifully crafted too, whilst being so ambitious in its reach.
Jeffrey Boakye, author of BLACK, LISTED
Ko paints a vivid portrait of friendship, ambition, gentrification and the ethics around all three.
Grazia
While it's a book about gentrification, surveillance, Big Tech, and elitism, it's also a book about the triumph of community, friendship and love.
Dazed
A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York's art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.
British Vogue
Limber, ambitious . . . [Memory Piece] belongs to an American literary tradition that includes Dana Spiotta, George Saunders and their patron saint, Don DeLillo: writers whose characters sense that their lives happen at the whim of forces too enormous to understand or evade, but set out to dodge them anyway.
The Atlantic
[Ko] draws characters with such deftness that they feel wholly alive. Details add up over time to create dazzling dimensionality. We see the characters as they see themselves, and as they see each other, allowing for a panoramic view.
Washington Post
Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad meets Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life - if the latter were 500+ pages shorter, infinitely less traumatic, and centered on a triad of Asian American women.
Oprah Daily
A moving, sharply observed portrait of friendship and discovering what it means to live a worthwhile life-whether or not it's anything like what we'd hoped.
Town & Country
A poignant meditation on late-stage capitalism: what it means to exist in an age of surveillance and government tracking, what it means to create art in an era where identity itself is commodified and what it means to find purpose.
Electric Literature

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