- Imprint: Vintage
- ISBN: 9781784700447
- Length: 288 pages
- Dimensions: 197mm x 18mm x 129mm
- Weight: 206g
- Price: £9.99
The Memory Police
byYoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translator)
Madeleine Thien, GuardianThe 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
David Mills, Sunday TimesIt'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
Jia Tolentino, The New YorkerMasterly...Like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Yoko Ogawa's novel transforms a familiar metaphor into imaginative truth.
Wall Street JournalIn 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
New York Times, pick of the monthExplores questions of power, trauma and state surveillance...particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe.
Washington PostThe fresh take on 1984 you didn't know you needed.
Ted Hodgkinson, Chair of Judges, International Man Booker PrizeThis 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.
New York Times Book ReviewThe 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.
Alex Clark, ObserverOgawa 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
TIME Magazine, Best Books of Summer 2019One 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.
About Yoko Ogawa
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her most recent novel, The Memory Police, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Details
All editions
- Paperback 2020
- Ebook 2019
- Audio Download 2023