The 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

It'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

Masterly...Like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Yoko Ogawa's novel transforms a familiar metaphor into imaginative truth.

In 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

Explores questions of power, trauma and state surveillance...particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe.

The fresh take on 1984 you didn't know you needed.

This 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.

The 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.

Ogawa 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

One 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.

This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever

A lovely, if bleak, meditation on faith and creativity - or faith in creativity - in a world that disavows both...The Memory Police truly feels like a portrait of today.

Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those who persistently but quietly rebel... mesmerizingly direct prose.

A work about identity, authoritarianism and self-expression

Margaret Atwood’s excellent The Blind Assassin comes to mind here...remarkably layered...we’re fortunate to have more work by such a uniquely gifted and idiosyncratic writer

**** An allegorical tale about how we are defined and maintained by our memories. It is easy to fall under the thrall of the exquisite sadness pervading the whole experience

Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind

Ogawa’s anointed translator, Snyder, adroitly captures the quiet control with which Ogawa gently unfurls her ominously surreal and Orwellian narrative. The Memory Police loom, their brutality multiplies, but Ogawa remarkably ensures that what lingers are the human(e) connections... As the visceral disappears, somehow the spirit holds on.

First it’s small things — bells, ribbons, stamps — that disappear from the cloistered Japanese island where an unnamed novelist toils over her next book and worries about her community’s increasing isolation. With the objects go the memory of them: “It doesn’t hurt,” the protagonist’s mother explains to her, “and you won’t even be particularly sad.” Eventually, the “disappeared” things — paper, springtime — grow in scale and value, and the narrator struggles to avoid the clutches of the titular Memory Police. An unfortunately zeitgeisty novel about censorship, oppression, and the gradual compression of experience under autocratic regimes, this is a deeply traumatizing novel in the best way possible.

The translation of this masterpiece by the acclaimed Japanese author into English this year is cause for celebration

Terrifying, surreal and profoundly moving

One of Japan's finest writers serves up a riveting slice of dystopian suspense, which is far more pertinent and reflective of modern society than one would like. A troubling examination of state surveillance and control.

Elegant, haunting

This beautiful and simple novel explores the power of memory and its importance to the soul

Strange and affectingly beautiful

A timely and powerful literary thriller which makes for a thought-provoking and unsettling read

Thought provoking and intelligent . . . I cannot recommend highly enough.

Offers a really interesting perspective on how women are represented in life

It is insidiously unnerving in such a clever way . . . had me well and truly hooked!

Dark, unforgiving, suspenseful and thought-provoking

Campus novel satire and the high drama of a thriller combine in a fiendishly readable interrogation of the allure of violent fiction

One of the most believable heroines I've seen on the page in a long time. The final chapters deliver the heart-in-mouth genre denouement we’ve been waiting for

A brilliant portrayal of love and complex family relationships, with all the features of a Gothic mystery.

A lushly written, psychologically suspenseful narrative that's not easily forgotten.

A darkly disquieting thriller... The descriptions are vivid enough to stop you in your tracks, and the narrative draws to a psychologically apt conclusion.

A multi-dimensional shocker, where everything is not as clear cut as it initially seems, leading to a devastating conclusion. Fans of the darker and more mysteriously menacing work of Stephen King or the contemporary horror of Andrew Michael Hurley will adore Sisters.

Johnson has cultivated a striking style with recurring images and themes... [her] stories contain minimal dialogue and very little straightforward narration. They are instead characterised by the accumulation of sensory detail, the gradual revealing of character, and a building sense of dread.

Johnson pulls off a great feat in this book. We are propelled by her story, even while we barely know what it is; absorbed by characters at once abstract yet fully drawn. She allows just enough clarity to pierce through, like flashes of an image amid white noise, until finally we can grasp and appreciate the whole picture that has so thrillingly eluded us.

Sisters echoes Brontë's Wuthering Heights not only in its gothic elements and sombre descriptions of English landscapes but also in the idea of doomed love, love which becomes an omnipotent, harmful power... Sisters is chilling and unrestful in a way many horror stories aren't, the world of the novel itself a disturbing and anxious place.

An absorbing tale of sibling love and envy.

It's hard to deny the uncanny thrill generated by Johnson's blend of horror, nature writing and magical realism... As dazzling as a photographer's flash.

Held me rapt until the very end

I didn't want to put it down

A beautiful and intriguing page-turner

Rich and atmospheric