THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN

Stacks of imagination

- Nick Setchfield

RELEASED OUT NOW!

4/5

336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Janelle Monáe (and collaborators) Publisher HarperVoyager

It’s the unspoken duty of pop stars to build universes. From Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar operas to the outsider kingdoms of David Bowie, the best musicians lease us imaginative real estate.

Janelle Monáe understands this more than most. Her debut EP Metropolis: Suite 1 (The Chase) introduced a precocious, ferocious talent as much in the bloodline of Fritz Lang as Prince. The first instalment of a conceptual series that took in time travel and messianic androids, its scrupulous world-building had the depth and ambition of a novel.

Her move into literature feels entirely natural, then. The Memory Librarian expands the mythos of 2018’s Dirty Computer, an album that paused the Metropolis sequence to establish a new dystopia, where identity and memory are threatened by totalitarian forces determined to stamp out all “antisocial deviance”. Resistance is found in everything from gender fluidity to the power of utopian dreaming, “where the computer cannot reach”.