The Memory Police
A Novel
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The Memory Police
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Narrated by:
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Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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Written by:
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Yoko Ogawa
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Stephen Snyder - translator
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 AudioYou may also enjoy...
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What the critics say
"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)
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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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Maria Saunders
- 2024-11-04
Beautiful imagery
I loved the author's imagery, the personification of items, the way she describes things that have disappeared from people's memories before giving them names. However, I felt the premise of the book might have been better done as a narrator, rather than in first person. Things that would have been known by a narrator but not by someone who has "lost" memories.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 2022-08-04
mysterious
I found the book a bit difficult to understand for someone who is starting to read books for leisurely reading! I'll have to try listening to it again in a couple years to extract meanings that the author intended.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Ryan Chowdhry
- 2021-10-24
Interesting narrative, but unresolved
No my favourite book by this author, but still enjoyable. I felt as though some parts of the book were unresolved, but perhaps that was the author’s intention. Overall, the performance brought me into this world, and that’s all I can really ask for.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Brent
- 2020-11-12
great story, meh narration
This book was great. Very well regarded and a good story. However, I did find the narration to be lacking due to the monotone of her voice.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Sandi
- 2020-03-19
Dystopian? Possibly
The Memory Police
This is a many layered tale but only two of the layers are obvious. While it sounds like science fiction sometimes to me it reads more like a gentle reminder of the reality of having some form of dementia. I'm very familiar with this as I just lost my Mom and she had dementia with Lewy Bodies. She died from something unrelated but after caregiving her for over five years this book hit me like a brick.
The writing is very cuturally Japanese and I love it's slow flow and simplicity. It's one of the reasons I'm a real fan of Japanese literature. Putting a dystopian twist on this for me is genius and even if it wasn't the intent of the author to be a story with a layer about truly forgetting it still resonated with me. The slow but yet more frequent disappearances of objects are unsettling and the progression of what you suspect is coming is artfully done.
Yoko Ogawa is wonderful and I hope she has a lot more stories because I want to read or listen to them all even if they make me cry. The narrator was perfect. Never letting the more unsettling parts make her reading more histrionic she kept with her more nuanced performance. This may well become a new favourite for me.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Denise Phipps
- 2022-11-14
The ending was disappointing
Not worth reading all the way through. There was so much potential for the book, it just ended abruptly and feels unfinished
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