The Memory Police

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

David Mills, 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.

Jia Tolentino, 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.

Ted Hodgkinson, Chair of Judges, International Man Booker Prize

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

Alex Clark, 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