JACKIE AND GISELLE

National Book Award Finalist for The Leavers, Lisa Ko's MEMORY PIECE is a daring, prescient narrative that chronicles the lives of three women against the backdrop of three distinct eras in a New York City where surveillance, gentrification, income disparity and policing intersect, and offers a map for a visionary future.

Giselle Chin is an ambitious aspiring performance artist in the eighties and nineties, who strives
to be recognized for her work but struggles with the rules and hierarchies of success and with
familial obligations and expectations. Jackie Ong is a queer web developer during the early
dotcom era, when the internet's promises are giving way to data mining and monetization. She
feels most comfortable in the digital world and wants to make her radical start-up idea, Lene, a reality, while grappling with the knowledge that the company she works for is stealing consumer information. Ellen Ng is a lifelong New Yorker and community activist who organizes around housing rights and mutual aid. In a New York City of the future she lives in a converted squat with her chosen family, where she has built a life centered on healing and resistance but where her very existence is threatened by the forces of capitalism and the prison and military-industrial complex. The women's lives intertwine throughout the novel as they work within and outside institutions to not only survive, but to live creative and meaningful lives, attempting to make a place for themselves and find value and understanding in a world inexorably moving toward a more ominous future.

Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, a novel which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A founding co-editor of Hyphen and a fiction editor at Drunken Boat, Lisa has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies from the Born in Queens and raised in Jersey, she lives in Brooklyn.