A deft and dark 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, things are disappearing. First, animals and flowers. Then objects--ribbons, bells, photographs. Then, body parts. Most of the island's inhabitants fail to notice these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the mysterious "memory police," who are committed to ensuring that the disappeared remain forgotten. When a young novelist realizes that more than her career is in danger, she hides her editor beneath her floorboards, and together, as fear and loss close in around them, they cling to literature as the last way of preserving the past. Part allegory, part literary thriller, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
"Unforgettable. . . . A masterful work of speculative fiction." --Chicago Tribune
"Ogawa's fable echoes the themes of George Orwell's 1984, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own." --Time
"A masterpiece. . . . A novel that makes us see differently. . . . It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision." --The Guardian
"A feat of dark imagination . . . an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance." --The Wall Street Journal
"[A] masterly novel." --The New Yorker
"An elegantly spare dystopian fable. . . . It tingles with dread." --The New York Times Book Review
"Quietly devastating . . . Ogawa finds new ways to express old anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental depredation and humanity's willingness to be complicit in its own demise." --The Washington Post
"Timely, provocative reading . . . A harrowing parable about the importance of memory and the profound danger of cultural amnesia." --Esquire
"One of my favorite novels of the decade. . . . It's a perfect correction to the overwrought politico-apocalyptic fiction so fashionable in These Times. . . . It clarifies all the things our wired society muddles, especially, and most profoundly, the saving grace of the human touch." --Hillary Kelly, Vulture
"Profoundly powerful. . . . It has the timelessness of a fable, yet feels like an urgent warning about the need for resistance in a world that seems all too quick to forget the lessons of the past." --The A.V. Club
"A searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer . . . Dark and ambitious." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. Throughout the book, citizens live under police surveillance. Novels are burned. People are detained and interrogated without explanation." --The New York Times
"Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those who persistently but quietly rebel." --The Japan Times
"Strange, beautiful and affecting." --The Sunday Times (London)
"The Memory Police truly feels like a portrait of today. To await the future is to disappear the present--which only accelerates the speed with which now turns to then, and then turns to nothing . . . A lovely, if bleak, meditation on faith and creativity--or faith in creativity--in a world that disavows both." --Wired
"Haunting and imaginative." --Refinery29
"Ogawa crafts a powerful story about the processing of loss and the importance of memories." --Annabel Gutterman, Time
"Eerily surreal, Ogawa's novel takes Orwellian tropes of a surveillance state and makes them markedly her own." --Thrillist
"A taut, claustrophobic thriller." --Salon
