The Memory Police

Paperback, 274 pages

English language

Published Oct. 29, 2020 by Penguin Random House.

ISBN:
978-1-78470-044-7
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Goodreads:
49098059

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4 stars (8 reviews)

**2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

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 …

6 editions

Radical acceptance, maddening passivity, or…?

4 stars

Kept waiting for the central allegory to explain itself: things disappear on an island, then the memories of them, all enforced by the titular authority. Felt similar to Miéville’s “The City and The City” but fuzzier. There’s no logic to what disappears—birds, stamps, green beans, roses—and people give them up with no resistance. Seeing how the banning of books and critical race theory played out, I think I get it now.

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