Memory Piece
On sale
21st March 2024
Price: £24.99
The award-winning author of The Leavers offers a visionary novel of friendship, art, and ambition that asks: What is the value of a meaningful life?
In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.
By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighbourhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.
Moving from the pre-digital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.
(P) 2024 Penguin Audio
In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.
By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighbourhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.
Moving from the pre-digital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.
(P) 2024 Penguin Audio
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Reviews
[Ko] draws characters with such deftness that they feel wholly alive. Details add up over time to create dazzling dimensionality. We see the characters as they see themselves, and as they see each other, allowing for a panoramic view.
Evocative and luminous. Ko once again introduces us to people we want to know deeply, then as always, delivers that and beyond. A glorious writer.
Ko paints a vivid portrait of friendship, ambition, gentrification and the ethics around all three.
There's no doubting Ko's talent . . . this epic is never less than engaging line by line.
Wild and wonderful, punk and propulsive, Memory Piece is about three friends growing from girlhood into a sinister new world. It is about authenticity, surveillance, capitalism, queerness, and the internet. It is about-it is-everything.
A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York's art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.
A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York's art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.
A group portrait of three women who wrest meaning from a world that is closing down around them, Memory Piece is bright with defiance, intelligence and stubborn love. To spend time with these characters is a gift.
A moving, sharply observed portrait of friendship and discovering what it means to live a worthwhile life-whether or not it's anything like what we'd hoped.
A poignant meditation on late-stage capitalism: what it means to exist in an age of surveillance and government tracking, what it means to create art in an era where identity itself is commodified and what it means to find purpose.
A sharp novel that spans the past, present and future of a friendship.
A touching story . . . Like her previous book, The Leavers, it's sure to become a modern classic.
Ambitious . . . [Ko] writes with a cool, collected intelligence and is unafraid to wrangle big ideas.
An urgent book that asks you to reflect on moments that feel definite but are actually transient, which is a real gift. Beautifully crafted too, whilst being so ambitious in its reach.
Dazzlingly inventive and knowing, Memory Piece is a bold and affecting novel about resistance, solidarity, and friendship.
Gritty and refreshingly girl-centric . . . It documents the last days of people being untrackable, able to disappear, and for this alone lingers in the imagination.
Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad meets Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life - if the latter were 500+ pages shorter, infinitely less traumatic, and centered on a triad of Asian American women.
Ko has brought us one of those rare, sumptuous tales of art and friendship that feels both universal and inimitable.
Limber, ambitious . . . [Memory Piece] belongs to an American literary tradition that includes Dana Spiotta, George Saunders and their patron saint, Don DeLillo: writers whose characters sense that their lives happen at the whim of forces too enormous to understand or evade, but set out to dodge them anyway.
Remarkable . . . vividly captures the urgency of youth, and becomes a heartbreaking elegy for a communal, almost utopian approach to urban life.
While it's a book about gentrification, surveillance, Big Tech, and elitism, it's also a book about the triumph of community, friendship and love.