Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons,birds, roses. . .
Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes,while those few able 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 writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.
Staff Choice: Jitse
A bleak distopian novel set on an Island where Things and the memories of them disappear overnight. Strictly enforced by the Memory Police, the Island's inhabitants are forced to discard all things associated with the wiped memories. As the story progresses more Things are disappeared, but the protagonist keeps remembering things.
Staff Choice: Ailish
The inhabitants of an unnamed island are slowly losing pieces from their reality. At first, fairly insignificant things like ribbons and roses disappear, and once they are no longer present on the island, the islanders forget they ever existed. Or at least, most of them do. Those who don't- like our narrator's beloved editor- are in danger of disappearing. This is a creepy, surreal-feeling novel that I couldn't put down once I'd started. There is this perfect combination of the narrator's very matter of fact tone and the terrifying events happening around her- this story is SO well told.