1
of
1
The Memory Police
Ratings/reviews counts are updated frequently.
Check link for latest rating. ( 128,613 ratings, 19,996 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still
learning, it may not be perfect - your
feedback is welcome!
Summary
Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$2400
$2600
Elsewhere:
Unit price
/
Unavailable
OVERNIGHT NZ-WIDE DELIVERY
Found a better price? Request a price match
The Memory Police
$2400
$2600
Elsewhere:
Unit price
/
Unavailable
Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and
still learning, it may not be perfect - your
feedback is welcome!
Description
The Memory Police is a compelling and surreal, Orwellian mystery by one of Japan's greatest writers.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, this enthralling Orwellian novel explores the terrors of state surveillance, showcasing the brilliance of its acclaimed author.
'Beautiful... Haunting' — Sunday Times
'A dreamlike story of dystopia' — Jia Tolentino
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?
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
Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is praised as a profound and thought-provoking novel, blending elements of fable and allegory. Critics highlight its ability to alter perceptions, explore human nature, and convey political and existential themes. The narrative is recognised for its beauty, emotional depth, and suspenseful storytelling, resonating strongly in contemporary contexts marked by rising authoritarianism.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781784700447
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 06 August 2020
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Vintage
Contributors:
- Translated by Stephen Snyder
- Translated by Stephen Snyder
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 18.0mm
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 205g
Pages: 288
About the Author
Yoko Ogawa (Author) 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. Stephen Snyder (Translator) Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino's Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, and his translation of Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.?
Also by Yoko Ogawa
View all-
The Housekeeper and the Professor (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
Vintage Japanese Classics - following on from the success of Vintage Russian Classics and European Classics, these are covetable new editions of the best Japanese writers on the Vintage list. 'This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water... Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world...Paperback$2400Elsewhere:$2600Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
Mina's Matchbox
A story of friendship and family secrets in 1970s Japan, from the prizewinning author of The Memory Police. On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars. After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya....Paperback$3500Elsewhere:$3800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
Mina's Matchbox
A story of friendship and family secrets in 1970s Japan, from the prizewinning author of The Memory Police. On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars. After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya....Paperback$2800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
The Diving Pool
Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women’s weird fiction. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool, sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary,...Paperback$2600Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Revenge
Elegant novellas-in-translation, VINTAGE EDITIONS celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found. From the author of The Memory Police "A conspicuously gifted writer...To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie...Paperback$2800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
Revenge
"Each tale here seems to be its own torture chamber--dark and meticulous . . . More disturbing than the bloody imagery is the eerie calm with which each plot unfolds, as if one act of violence must necessarily transform into the portal for another." --The New Yorker A collection of eleven eerie and harrowing interwoven tales from the award-winning author...Paperback$5100Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
The Housekeeper and the Professor
Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family. He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young...Paperback$5100Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
The Housekeeper and the Professor
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family. He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute...PaperbackSold Out -
The Housekeeper and the Professor
An enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist. He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem — ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is...PaperbackSold Out -
Revenge
Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found. From the author of The Memory Police 'A conspicuously gifted writer...To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy,...PaperbackSold Out
More from Crime & Thriller
View all-
New ReleaseIt Could Have Been Her
PREPARE TO BE HOOKED: The no. 1 Sunday Times and MULTI-million-copy bestselling author is back with a brand-new spine tingling thriller. It was the night she almost died. Jane Trevally, newly divorced and feeling a little lost, agrees to accompany a man she doesn't know to his house in the darkest corner of Hampstead Heath. She's offered a drink, goes in, and...Paperback$3000Elsewhere:$3800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
New Release26 Beauties
The twenty-sixth thrilling novel in the globally bestselling Women's Murder Club series. Beautiful young women are disappearing by the dozen. A celebration is cut short when a concerned father crashes Detective Inspector Lindsay Boxer's party. His daughter is missing - and she's not the only one. DI Lindsay Boxer has been tracking a chilling pattern: a Jane Doe washed ashore,...Paperback$3199Elsewhere:$3800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
New ReleaseThe Secrets We Hide
The stunning new North Falls thriller by the bestselling author of We Are All Guilty Here 'Quite simply, Karin Slaughter is the best of us' Dervla McTiernan Welcome back to North Falls -- a small town with big secrets. The house at 1601 Iris Drive looks like any other in the quiet, residential street. But rumours are rife about the Vickery...Paperback$3099Elsewhere:$3799Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
Hope Rises
'BALDACCI IS STILL PEERLESS' - THE SUNDAY TIMES REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED COLD . . . Walter Nash, working under the alias of Dillon Hope, is on the road to revenge after becoming an informant for the FBI against a global criminal operation headed up by Victoria Steers. Steers has ripped everything Nash held dear away from him....Paperback$3099Elsewhere:$3800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
New Release
Slash
A year after a brutal shootout left her lover dead, ex-police sergeant Honey Chalmers is a hot mess, drinking too much and eating too little, working casual gigs for a shady firm of private investigators — while holding conversations with a ghost. A desperate father asks her to investigate his missing son — a double-murder suspect last seen during the...Paperback$3200Elsewhere:$3799Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
New Release
A River Red With Blood
The players call it the Game, and its aim is simple: to abduct and kill a stranger without getting caught. They're very good at it. They've been playing it for a long time. And they can keep playing as long as everyone sticks to the rules: No Killing Close to Home and No Killing Outside the Game. But those rules...Paperback$3199Elsewhere:$3799Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
The Shadow Step
The new Detective Miller thriller from bestselling author Mark Billingham, full of tension, wit and incredible twists. The Shadow Step: One taken simultaneously by a pair of dancers facing the same direction, one of them behind and slightly shifted leftwards ('in the shadow') Typically, such a step perfectly demonstrates synchronized elegance. It showcases a couple in near telepathic harmony with...Paperback$3199Elsewhere:$3799Unit price /UnavailableBackorderShips mid August -
New ReleaseSome Sort of Justice
The first time in print for the million-copy-selling crime writer. This time, a cast of good coppers, a wily ex-detective and a shadowy, well-connected operative are brought together by an aristocratic fatality. Only there's no body, no forensics—and enemies in the highest places. When Caroline Thorpe succeeded in casting doubt on the verdict of the inquest into her brother's death,...Paperback$3199Elsewhere:$3800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
The Ending Writes Itself
Secrets don't stay secret for long in publishing Six authors. One private island. Seventy-two hours to write the ending that will change their lives. ‘This is a house of novelists, not murderers. You dream up crimes. You don’t commit them.’ ‘But a writer has. And so, who better than a writer to catch them?’ World famous author Arthur Fletch is...Paperback$2800Elsewhere:$3499Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
New ReleaseNeighbourhood Watch
Neighbourhood Watch is a sharp, stylish thriller with a killer opening hook, a generous dose of dark humour, and a truly distinctive voice. ― Christian White The annual Curlew Street scarecrow competition is back, and the residents of Melbourne’s inner north have never seen an entry like it. Shirt bloody, head and arms slumped over a scarecrow crucifix: Victoria’s most...Paperback$2999Elsewhere:$3699Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow -
For All the Dead Girls
Tough and gutsy PI Lou Alcott returns with a terrifyingly gritty new case that takes her deep into the dark web. Perfect for fans of Jacqueline Bublitz and Jane Caro. While juggling a missing person case with unexpected ties close to home and saving an innocent woman and her child from a dangerous domestic situation, Lou ends up in the...Paperback$2899Elsewhere:$3499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Don’t Let Him In
Prepare to be hooked—the no. 1 Sunday Times and multi-million-copy bestselling author is back with a brand-new, spine-tingling thriller. He's the perfect man. He says he loves you. You think he might even be made for you. Before long he's moved into your house—and into your heart. And then he leaves for days at a time. You don't know where...Paperback$3200Elsewhere:$3800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips tomorrow
Why buy from us?
Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!
Service & Delivery
Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 80,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.
Auckland Bookstore
We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.
Our Gifting Service
Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.
Crime & Thriller lists from the team
Explore our curated lists from our heroes to find your next read!
