The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Craving more nightmarish, Orwellian state surveillance? Add Yoko Ogawa’s 2020 American Book Award-winning novel, The Memory Police, to your TBR pile as soon as possible. In it, we’re transported to an unnamed island where things are constantly disappearing: flowers, ribbons, pieces of clothing, even a few animals. Is it something supernatural? Something psychological?
Not everyone has picked up on what’s gone missing, however, due to the Memory Police, a shady state organization dedicated to keeping those items out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. But when a young novelist — whose mother was one of the few people on the island whose mind wasn’t affected by these disappearances — starts to piece things together, she realizes her own editor is in grave danger. She hides him to save him from being captured and killed by the Memory Police, and together they use her writing as a tether to the past in an effort to cling to their collective memories.
