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Memory Piece

Readers were first introduced to the considerable talents of Lisa Ko with the release of her “masterful” (Redbook) and “ambitious” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel, The Leavers. Named a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver to receive the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, The Leavers catapulted Ko into the literary stratosphere, highlighting the powerful ways in which her “achingly beautiful” prose (The Christian Science Monitor) and “unforgettable narrative voice” (NYLON) “mirror America’s own urgent and timely political landscape” (W magazine).

So it is a thrill to share with you MEMORY PIECE, Ko’s highly anticipated second novel, coming March 19, 2024. It’s a gripping exploration of friendship, art, and ambition that reflects the complex dynamics of American culture while asking compelling questions about our future. This novel is big, ambitious, and poised to be one of the most celebrated books of the new year.

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 one another as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity. As their friendship matures and changes over several decades, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves. Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a richly 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.

Passionate fans of this novel include Jacqueline Woodson, Rumaan Alam, Dana Spiotta, C Pam Zhang, and more. National Book Award finalist Julia Phillips calls it “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 literary powerhouse, Lisa Ko’s MEMORY PIECE explores heady themes of class, money, power, and art. Thought-provoking and sophisticated, moving and richly imagined, this novel helps readers understand the world they live in and provides a vision for the future.

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