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The Memory Police

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers.
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Hat, ribbon, bird rose.

To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.

When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
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Finalist for the National Book Award 2019
Longlisted for the Translated Book Award 2020
New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year

'This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever' Guardian, Books of the Year

'Echoes the themes of George Orwell's 1984, but it has a voice and power all its own' Time

'A novel that makes us see differently... A masterpiece' Madeleine Thien

©2019 Yoko Ogawa (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics 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
Guardian
It's an age since I read a book as strange, beautiful and affecting… this haunting work reaches beyond…to examine what it is to be human… a remarkable writer
Sunday Times
Masterly...Like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Yoko Ogawa's novel transforms a familiar metaphor into imaginative truth.
The New Yorker
In a feat of dark imagination, Yoko Ogawa stages an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance while conjuring up a world that is at once recognizable and profoundly strange
Wall Street Journal
Explores questions of power, trauma and state surveillance...particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe.
New York Times, pick of the month
The fresh take on 1984 you didn't know you needed.
Washington Post
This is a work of immense precision that is drawing on allegory, that is drawing on myth, that is drawing on dystopia and is doing that deftly. It is the work of a Japanese master who transcends her cultural context to speak to us on a level that is universal.
The acclaimed Japanese writer’s fifth English release is 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.
New York Times Book Review
Ogawa exploits the psychological complexity of…[a] bizarre situation to impressive effect… her achievement is to weave in a far more personal sense of the destruction and distortion of the psyche
Observer
One of Japan’s most acclaimed authors explores truth, state surveillance and individual autonomy. Ogawa’s fable echoes the themes of George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own.
TIME Magazine, Best Books of Summer 2019

User Reviews

Book 4.0
Narration 5.0
Author Yoko Ogawa
Narrator Traci Kato-Kiriyama
Duration 9 hours and 9 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781529934144
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Dystopian and utopian fiction, Fiction in translation, Narrative theme: Identity / belonging, Narrative theme: Interior life, Science fiction
Collections Translated Fiction
Availability AU, GB, IE
Rating
4.0 (1 review)
Narration
5.0 (1 review)

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