The Memory of Love

• The Memory of Love stands above most of these for the sheer quality of its writing, the closeness of its concentration on individual people and the details of their lives, and its refusal to take the easy route of making the mere fact of such atrocities an automatic handle on the reader's sympathies. It is a dense book, a long one, and undeniably sad. But hopeful too, hopeful because human.

• Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise--an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation.

• Aminatta Forna has succeeded in writing a beautiful and painful novel on the aftermath of civil war in Sierra Leone. It is a book about love and loss, highlighting both physical wounds (Kai, one of the protoganists is surgeon) as psychological damage and mental health. It goes back to the past through the personal story of Elias Cole, former Dean at the university, and intertwines several personal stories into a fascinating whole in which all is concealed but intensely connected.

• The main narrative is in the voices of Adrian, an English psychiatrist working in the country, and a dying man Elias Cole. Still, you get to hear the stories of dashing doctor Kai Mansaray, the quiet & fiesty Mamakay and the other characters who make this story. The individual stories are so good, at some point I was wondering “What’s up? How do these go together?” and at the right time, bam- all the dots connected.

• Forna’s acceptance of this wounded and unnamed country gives it an intimacy that all really good fiction has—she is not expressing outrage or lecturing us but simply telling a story that speaks for itself and is so affecting and terrible because of her ability to present it in all its bewildering facets.

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