memory of love book review

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The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

A minatta Forna's brilliant new novel takes an oblique look at the Sierra Leonean civil war of the 1990s. Instead of focusing on the gruesome details of killing and looting and the sectarian politics behind it all, the novel examines in clinical and psychological detail how people survive the memory of war. Despite its horrors, war at least provided some certainties; people survived from day to day. Now the future lies before them and they are uncertain, filled with memories of loss and shame, often pushed into a state of fugue. Forna describes this as a "dissociative condition in which the mind creates an alternative state. This state may be considered a place of safety, a refuge." It is a coping mechanism, often involuntary. Some characters, such as the retired university professor Elias Cole, try to review their history for posterity, hiding the dark moments, emphasising the good ones. Some, including the idealistic young doctor Kai Mansaray, would escape to America – if only he could drop the heavy baggage he is carrying.

Others, like Agnes, end up in the lunatic asylum. Of all the stories of loss in the book, none is so harrowing as hers. She witnessed her husband's beheading by rebel soldiers, lost two daughters and, when she returns home after the war, she finds her only surviving daughter married to the soldier who beheaded her husband. They all have to live together, victim and perpetrator, and pretend it never happened. But there is no fooling the mind. Agnes periodically loses her senses and wanders away from home.

On one occasion she ends up in the care of Dr Adrian Lockheart, a visiting psychologist from London. Most of the story takes place in a hospital, highlighting the central theme of healing. The doctors are mostly expat volunteers, like Adrian, from the same western countries that averted their eyes while Sierra Leone burned.

Adrian is one of the four central characters in the novel and functions as a conduit through which we encounter the stories of the others. On his deathbed, Elias tells Adrian of his obsession with the beautiful Saffia, wife to Julius. "Elias seemed to him to be a lonely man in search of a peaceful death. Adrian might have been a priest, an imam, counsellor or layman." Elias's story is one of love turning to loss even before it begins. When they love, the characters do so passionately, jealously, because they know how ephemeral love can be. Love is taken away from them when it is sweetest, like that between Kai Mansaray and the beautiful Nenebah, or between Adrian and the local girl Mamakay. Kai reflects: "Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love."

Forna writes like a scientist, not only in the accuracy of her descriptions but in the way she selects which incidents to highlight, turning each scene into a metaphor that reverberates with meaning beyond the event itself. One character can't walk, and the doctors are carefully breaking his legs and putting them back together to help him do so. This procedure becomes a symbol for the nation, determined to regain the use of its legs after the crippling civil war.

Forna's writing is not lyrical; you feel that what she is reaching for is economy of phrasing, aptness of imagery, exactness of description, and she achieves that perfectly. This is a remarkable novel: well researched, well thought out, well written – the kind that deserves to be on the Booker shortlist.

Helon Habila's Oil on Water will be published in August by Hamish Hamilton.

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THE MEMORY OF LOVE

by Aminatta Forna ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2011

Tragedy and its aftermath are affectingly, memorably evoked in this multistranded narrative from a significant talent.

In a soft-spoken story of brutality and endurance set in postwar Sierra Leone, three lonely men are connected by love and a legacy of terror.

Gravitas distinguishes the ambitious second novel by Forna ( Ancestor Stones , 2006, etc.), which uses a handful of perspectives and consciences to consider the impact of civil war on an African nation. Adrian Lockheart, a British psychiatrist, is treating elderly, dying Elias Cole, a history lecturer who recounts his obsession, decades earlier, with Saffia, the wife of Julius, a colleague who is suddenly arrested and who dies in police custody. Although she does not love him, Saffia later marries Elias and they have a child. Was Elias partly complicit in Julius’s death? Kai, a surgeon at the same hospital as Adrian who has treated victims of the civil war, notably amputees cleaved by machetes, is haunted by terrible events. And Adrian is drawn deeper into recent history by a patient whose disorder symbolizes the scarcely bearable legacy of atrocities inflicted on the civilian population. Setting her story against a background of streets, beaches, bars, police stations and hospitals, Forna evokes a vivid social and cultural panorama. Affection between characters is overshadowed by politics, poverty and the larger fingerprint of a bloody past. While later episodes are weakened by occasional lapses of subtlety and too much connection heaped on a single character, Forna’s insight, elegance and elegiac tone never falter.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-8021-1965-0

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010

LITERARY FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Aminatta Forna

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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The Memory of Love : Book summary and reviews of The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

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The Memory of Love

by Aminatta Forna

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Published Jan 2011 464 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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Adrian Lockheart is a psychologist escaping his life in England. Arriving in Freetown in the wake of civil war, he struggles with the intensity of the heat, dirt and dust, and with the secrets this country hides. Despite the gulf of experience and understanding between them, Adrian finds unexpected friendship in a young surgeon at the hospital, the charismatic Kai Mansaray, and begins to build a new life just as Kai makes plans to leave. In the hospital Adrian encounters an elderly and unwell man, Elias Cole, who is reflecting on his past, not all of it noble. Recorded in a series of notebooks are memories of his youth, the optimism of the first moon landings, and the details of an obsession: Saffia, a woman he loved, and Julius, her fiery, rebellious husband. As their individual stories entwine across two generations in a country torn apart by repression and war, some distances cannot be bridged. The Memory of Love is a towering tale of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, superbly realized and beautifully written, horrifying and exhilarating, unflinching and tender, moving and uplifting. It is the story of four lives colliding; a story about friendship, about understanding, absolution and the indelible effects of the past; about journeys and dreams and loss, and about the very nature of love.

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"The book's prolixity, combined with scenes that drag or come off as forced, certainly doesn't ruin the experience, but it does occasionally glut what amounts to a heartening cry for moral responsibility in the thick of maddening injustice." - Publishers Weekly "Starred Review. Tragedy and its aftermath are affectingly, memorably evoked in this multi-stranded narrative from a significant talent." - Kirkus

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Aminatta Forna Author Biography

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Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow and raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She is the author of The Memory of Love , Ancestor Stones , The Devil that Danced on the Water , and The Memory of Love , which has been selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Sunday Telegraph , Financial Times and Times . In 2002 Forna helped to build a primary school in her family's village of Rogbonko. The building of the school was the first step in what would become known as the Rogbonko Project: a community effort to create an escape route from poverty through multiple initiatives in the spheres of education, agriculture, infrastructure and health. Forna is a trustee of the Royal Literary Fund and sits on the advisory committee of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She has also ...

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Name Pronunciation Aminatta Forna: A-mi-na-tta FOR-na

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The memory of love, by aminatta forna, recommendations from our site.

“It’s about Adrian Lockhart who is a psychologist in Sierra Leone and talking to Elias Cole, who is telling him his story. He also befriends a doctor. The doctor is trying to heal people physically affected by the war, whereas Adrian is trying to deal with those people affected psychologically. So it encompasses both aspects of the effects of war…It’s the unravelling of things that affect all the people in the story. You don’t just hear, ‘Oh, this happened, and this happened, and this happened.’ It’s a very close study of what is happening with the person and then a revelation of why that is happening. I thought that was masterfully done, it was very well-crafted. There was always something at the end of the character’s story that you discovered, and made you think, ‘Wow’. I thought it was a very strong piece of storytelling.” Read more...

The Best African Novels

Blessing Musariri , Novelist

Aminatta FOrna

• Bloomsbury (UK), Atlantic Monthly Press (USA)
• Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle, iBook, Audio

The Memory of Love

Winner of the commonwealth writer's prize best book award 2011, finalist, orange prize for fiction 2011, finalist, impac award 2012, finalist, warwick prize 2011, nominee, european prize for fiction 2013, a new york times editor's choice 2011, a "best books of 2011".

An African city, where a dying man Elias Cole, reflects on a past obsession: Saffia, the woman he loved, and Julius, her charismatic, unpredictable husband.

Arriving in the wake of war Adrian Lockheart is a psychologist new to this foreign land, struggling with its secrets and the intensity of the heat, dust and dirt, until he finds friendship in Kai Mansaray, a young colleague at the hospital. All three lives will collide in a story about friendship, love, war, about understanding the indelible effects of the past and the nature of obsessive love.

The Memory of Love was short-listed for both the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011, the IMPAC Award 2012 and the Warwick Prize 2011; voted one of the "Best Books of the Year" by the Sunday Telegraph , Financial Times and Times newspapers; and was a New York Times Editor's Choice book.

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Reviews and praise for the memory of love.

"[A] luminous tale of passion and betrayal....Forna knows precisely when to push in and hold our gaze. [Her] sharp eye spares no one its brutal honesty. [Forna] forces us to see past bland categorizations like 'postcolonial African literature,' showing that the world we inhabit reaches beyond borders and ripples out through generations. She reminds us that what matters most is that which keeps us grounded in the place of our choosing. And she writes to expose what remains after all the noise has faded: at the core of this novel is the brave and beating heart, at once vulnerable and determined, unwilling to let go of all it has ever loved." Maaza Mengiste, The New York Times [ Read more ]

"[E]legantly rendered....[ The Memory of Love ] rarely addresses war directly, instead embedding it in every sentence. By opening up a shared space for considering the past, Forna makes her world habitable again." Jessica Loudis, San Francisco Chronicle [ Read more ]

"[Forna] is really interested in the effects of war on the noncombatants. It's a book that you can't read quickly." NPR

"Aminatta Forna's brilliant new novel takes an oblique look at the Sierra Leonean civil war of the 1990s." Helon Habila, The Guardian [ Read more ]

"If West Africa has lived through some of the most grotesque episodes of the 20th century, it has also been blessed with several generations of extraordinary writing talents who continue to turn those ordeals into heart-rending literature." Michela Wrong, The Spectator [ Read more ]

"As Forna's forensic re-inhabiting of the aftermath of the conflict reveals, these wounds may have vivid physical realities, but it is always behind the eyes that they are felt most keenly." Tim Adams, the Observer [ Read more ]

"Forna weaves an intricate tapestry of betrayal, tragedy and loss; expertly drawing together the threads that link the sick old man, the brilliant doctor with dreams of leaving his troubled homeland, the wounded English psychologist and the young woman who links the three of them in a common bond of love. This is an ambitious project. Forna has written before about the power of storytelling to talk our lives into different shapes. Here she moves deftly between the enchantments of different narratives: the therapeutic, the confessional, the traumatic—flashbacks, nightmares, hauntings, fugue states where stories are lost or distorted beyond recognition and the sweetly joyous themes of new love, renewal, springing hope, second chances." The Telegraph , April 2010 [ Read more ]

"Aminatta Forna's novel is intelligent, engrossing and beautifully crafted." The Daily Mail [ Read more ]

"Aminatta Forna's two previous books explored, with elegance and empathy, the conflicts endemic to Sierra Leone. Her second novel continues Forna's examination of unpalatable truths while sacrificing none of her talent as a storyteller." The Sunday Telegraph [ Read more ]

"Through the complicated connections between characters, Forna explores a country’s history: the violence and chaos of war, the scars, the hope and determination and the uncertainty of rebuilding." The Sunday Times [ Read more ]

"Forna reveals the legacy of [the war's] damage, viscerally visible in injured bodies, but just as devastating to the mental health of the survivors who were witnesses and victims of a repressive regime. Heartbreaking." Marie Claire

"Forna [assembles] her character with the patience and vision of a chess master, and soon they are locked in an inexorable collision of good and evil and past and present, until we read on hurriedly to see if they will be left with hope." Metro

" The Memory of Love is a beautifully crafted tale of life in Sierra Leone in the aftermath of the civil war.....This is not a book to be read lightly, but one to savour and share." Stylist

"She threads her stories like music, imperceptibly into the reader's consciousness. One is left hauntingly familiar with the distant and alien; not quite able to distinguish the emotional spirits of fiction from the scars of real experience." Sam Kiley, The Times

Full review from The Times "From time to time one comes across a turn of phrase, a descriptive passage, a metaphor so apt that it rings like lead crystal. Forna doesn't write that way. She threads her stories like music, imperceptibly into the reader's consciousness. One is left hauntingly familiar with the distant and alien; not quite able to distinguish the emotional spirits of fiction from the scars of real experience. "The setting is exotic—Sierra Leone in early postwar recovery. Elias Cole lies in a hospital bed dying. Cultured and eloquent, he now finds a facility for honesty that had eluded him for most of a life of compromise and unexceptional, but ultimately tragic, betrayal. He hasn't been a bad man. He has been an ordinary man who failed to rise to the challenge of the extraordinary times that crowded in on him. An academic, he fell in love with a glamorous colleague's glamorous wife at a time when Africa was blooming with post-independence possibilities, and men were landing on the Moon. Now he chooses to tell a well-meaning and somewhat lost English psychiatrist, Adrian, of how the hope of that age came to have been snuffed out. But, like the ghost of an amputated limb, the recollection of hope lingers. "There will be inevitable comparisons made between The Memory of Love and Chinua Achebe's dystopic Things Fall Apart because, well, things do fall apart—while at the same time Cole flourishes on the betrayal that won him the enigmatic hand of the glamorous Saffia. There are echoes, too, of Graham Greene's own tale of cowardice, Catholic guilt and betrayal, which is also set in Sierra Leone, The Heart of the Matter. But, whereas these masterpieces were set in time and space, Forna's latest novel transcends both by sweeping through from the campus hothouses of the 1960s to a shabby and traumatised today. Time has changed and the space has been burnt, blood-soaked, washed down and whitewashed. In the present we find Kai Mansaray, a young surgeon whose best friend has emigrated to America. He survived the massacres of the civil war by saving lives in his hospital and through good fortune. Now he cannot seem to do the sensible thing and leave too. Instead he paces out his insomnia in Adrian's flat. "Like old man Cole he, too, can remember halcyon days before the war. He can remember loving Nenebah and picnicking in the hills above the university, where the two of them gave names to hordes of baby ants. Perhaps he loves the memory of it. "Adrian, who left a wife and children in England to "help" in Africa, is out of his depth. Through Cole he comes to understand that the roots of the civil war grew in the soil of authoritarianism decades ago (which Cole, the aging academic, embraced as a young man in return for promotion). But he has underestimated the scale of the trauma that civil war can leave behind. How do you counsel a nation? "A chance encounter with Agnes, who goes on to become his patient and who suffers from a compulsion to walk enormous distances, but has no recollection of her journeys, exposes him to the cosmic horror of what went on. She is his redemption, she gives him a focus, a sense that through her he might have a "right" to even be there. As he grows in confidence and relaxes into Forna's beautifully drawn landscape of Freetown bars, cafés and dusty, clogged streets, he falls for Mamakay—not knowing of her connection to either Kai or Cole but gently celebrating the luxury of loving someone. "Forna's characters weave in and out of each other's lives, often with entirely unforeseeable and shocking consequences. They are so well drawn, and so universally authentic, that each time the narrative view switches from one to the other one almost longs for a convenient two dimensional caricature as light relief from possession. With whom can the reader most easily identify? Adrian, the English ingénu? Kai, the heroic surgeon who cannot see the green grass in the other field? Cole, the sell-out? Or Agnes—whose mind has quite rightly opted to walk rather than think about what she must endure? "Forna's intense research into surgery and psychiatry is as lightly worn as her ability to hide her own craft as a writer. Whether the reader is picking through hospital corridors sour and foul with blood and sweat, or blushing at the invisible smirk hidden by local doctors from the visiting Englishman, the stitching is invisible. "Forna's memoir The Devil Who Danced on the Water deals with the harrowing fact of the execution of her father, Dr Mohammed Forna, a leading opposition politician in Sierra Leone. Her first novel, Ancestor Stones , explored the magical capacity of women to survive the worst that mankind can throw at wives, children and daughters. Her latest work, although haunted by real events far away, explores the universal agony of choice. Head or heart? Friend or self? Let us hope that it takes its place where it deserves to be: not at the top of the pile of "African Literature" but outside any category altogether—and at the top of award shortlists." Sam Kiley

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The Memory of Love Kindle Edition

• Print length 465 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date January 4, 2011
• File size 5320 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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From publishers weekly, from booklist, about the author.

Aminatta Forna is the author of two novels, Ancestor Stones and The Memory of Love , and The Devil That Danced on the Water , a memoir of her activist father, and her country, Sierra Leone. She lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The memory of love, atlantic monthly press, chapter one.

Excerpted from THE MEMORY OF LOVE by Aminatta Forna Copyright © 2010 by Aminatta Forna. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004I6DD10
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atlantic Monthly Press; Reprint edition (January 4, 2011)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 4, 2011
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 5320 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 465 pages
• #2,380 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
• #3,013 in Historical Literary Fiction
• #3,476 in War Fiction (Kindle Store)

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Aminatta forna.

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The Memory of Love

Aminatta Forna

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010

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Memory of Love (Olsson)

The Memory of Love   Linda Olsson, 2011 (The Kindness of Your Nature, New Zealand) Penguin Publishing 240 pp. ISBN-13: 9780143122432 Summary From the beloved author of Astrid & Veronika , a moving tale of friendship and redemption … Olsson is doing what she does best: illuminating the terrain of friendship and examining the many forms that love can take . Marion Flint, in her early fifties, has spent fifteen years living a quiet life on the rugged coast of New Zealand, a life that allows the door to her past to remain firmly shut. But a chance meeting with a young boy, Ika, and her desire to help him force Marion to open the Pandora’s box of her memory. Seized by a sudden urgency to make sense of her past, she examines each image one-by-one: her grandfather, her mother, her brother, her lover. Perhaps if she can create order from the chaos, her memories will be easier to carry. Perhaps she’ll be able to find forgiveness for the little girl that was her. For the young woman she had been. For the people she left behind. Olsson expertly interweaves scenes from Marion’s past with her quest to save Ika from his own tragic childhood, and renders with reflective tenderness the fragility of memory and the healing power of the heart. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio • Birth—1948 • Where—Stockholm, Sweden • Education—J.D., University of Stockholm; University of Wellington • Currently—lives in Auckland, New Zealand Linda Olsson is a Swedish-born novelist who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Published in 2003, her first novel, Astrid and Veronika , became an international best seller and was translated into 15 languages. She writes all of her novels in both English and Swedish. Born and raised in Stockholm, Olsson attended the University of Stockholm. After graduating with a law degree, she worked in banking and finance, eventually getting married and giving birth to three boys.

In 1986, her family left Sweden for Africa where Olsson initially intended to take up a post in Kenya. But she traveled on to Singapore, Britain, and Japan, finally settling in New Zealand with her family in 1990. She continued her studies at the University of Wellington, graduating in English and German literature. During her time in London, Olsson signed up for a course in creative writing and was encouraged to begin writing short stories. In 2003, after arriving in New Zealand, she won a short story competition run by the Sunday Star Times . She then enrolled in a postgraduate course, "Writing the Novel," and was inspired to try her hand at long-form fiction. Olsson's first novel was completed in 2005. Astrid and Veronika (originally titled "Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs") became a Swedish bestseller. Subsequent novels include Sonata for Miriam (2009), The Memory of Love (2011— The Kindness of Your Nature in New Zealand ), The Blackbird Sings at Dusk (2016—not available in the U.S.), and A Sister in My House (2016, 2018 in the U.S.). Under the pen name Adam Sarafis, OLsson has also collaborated with Thomas Sainsbury on the thriller Something is Rotten (2015). ( Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/6/2018 .)

Book Reviews Exquisitely rendered…quietly gripping. Cleveland Plain Dealer Haunting and beautiful, [ The Memory of Love ] is a reminder of the fragility of happiness and the impossibility of living without hope. Otago Times ( New Zealand ) Linda Olsson writes beautifully, capturing the fragile nature of her characters and the beauty of the rugged landscape around her with great precision and subtlety. A hugely evocative book. The story gets under your skin and will live on long after the final page has been turned. Gisborne Herald ( New Zealand ) The emotional weather of the story is changeable and dramatic, with storm clouds sometimes threatening, unpredictable tides and winds of inner conflict, and chance meetings.… It is the storytelling, of course, that is most seductive, with the right balance between the disclosure and holding back of information to keep us reading to the end—appreciating at every twist a writer delighting in her craft. Sunday Star Times ( New Zealand ) [A] tender, loving story…concerned with searching and healing.… You sense an author of real integrity. Weekend Herald   ( New Zealand ) Olsson's lyrical style is perfectly suited to the reflective tenderness that characterises Marion's narrative voice.… The tragedies of the novel, combined with the powerful resonance of the windswept and lonely coast, makes [ The Memory of Love ] a heavily atmospheric novel of great emotional weight. Listener   ( New Zealand ) Olsson successfully intertwines New Zealand and Sweden to create a beautiful and compelling story. Mahrangimatters   ( New Zealand ) One of the most stirring and sensitive books I have read for a long time.… An outstanding read. Star   ( New Zealand ) [A] touching, if far-fetched, tale.… The author’s prose is at times pinched and lapidary, while at others, effusive and overstated, and sometimes both.… [Yet] Olsson handles Marion and Ika’s story in a beautifully natural fashion. Publishers Weekly [A] deeply poetic novel...and a credit to Olsson’s narrative technique….Fans of Jennifer Haigh and Heidi W. Durrow will appreciate this darkly emotional novel. Booklist

Discussion Questions 1. What is the particular appeal of reading this kind of emotionally rich and complex novel? Does witnessing Marion’s struggle to make sense of her life help you to make sense of your own? 2. How is little Marianne affected by being taken from her grandfather to live with her mother and Hans in Stockholm? What coping strategies does she develop to manage her loneliness, fear, and confusion? 3. What is the effect of the narrative moving back and forth between Marion’s past and present? What are some of the most surprising and traumatic moments in her personal history? Why would Olsson choose to reveal these moments gradually rather than all at once? 4. Late in the novel, Marion tries to look at her relationship with Ika objectively and asks herself, “Had I used him? Was he simply a tool for me to give my soul peace? Redeem myself? Could I ever isolate my feelings for Ika from my past? See him as he was, see his true needs?” (p. 171). In what ways might Marion’s personal history have colored her relationship with Ika? Is she using him to fulfill her own needs or is she motivated more by compassion than selfishness? 5. In what ways does her relationship with Ika change Marion? Why would a mostly silent, slightly autistic nine-year-old boy lead to such major transformations in her? In what ways does he serve as a doorway into her buried past? 6. What is the significance of Marion first finding Ika lying on the beach? Does it remind her of earlier events in her life? 7. Marion, Ika, and George have all suffered major losses. Marion has lost her parents, her brother, and her grandfather, as well as her husband through divorce. Ika’s mother died soon after giving birth to him, and he never knew his father. George has lost his wife. “My home died with my wife,” he says (p. 156). In what ways might these losses have prepared them to create a new family, and a new home, with each other? Is there any way these terribly painful experiences can be seen as gifts? 8. Why does Marion feel compelled to make sense of her life, her history? Why is it so important to put the events of her life in some kind of order, to see it “as a whole”? (p. 9). How does she find that wholeness and accept her past by the end of the book? 9. Why does Olsson end the novel with George taking Marion and Ika on a helicopter flight over the project Marion and Ika have been working on? What is the significance of this heightened perspective and of Marion and Ika being able to see their project in its entirety rather than just its individual parts? ( Questions issued by the publisher .)

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Anne Lamott Has Written Classics. This Is Not One of Them.

Slim and precious, “Somehow: Thoughts on Love” doesn’t measure up to her best nonfiction.

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SOMEHOW: Thoughts on Love, by Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott is a national treasure who, at age 70, is putting out not books but throw pillows with embroidered mottoes and little tassels. A lot of people find comfort in them and will curl right up with her latest, “Somehow,” a collection of inspirational anecdotes and meditations. Yours truly wants them off the bed.

It wasn’t always like this. In a world when many books are regrettably D.O.A., Lamott published two works of nonfiction in the space of two years that were C.O.A.: classics on arrival.

“ Operating Instructions ” (1993) was a scatologically exact account of raising her baby, Sam, minus a father in the picture, that presaged a brood of parenting memoirs, including Rachel Cusk’s “A Life’s Work.”

And countless writers have clutched “ Bird by Bird ” (1994), a guide to conquering the terror of the blank page during their dark nights of the soul. (Darker, so much darker, since the internet made words cheap.)

My introduction to Lamott was reviewing “Crooked Little Heart” (1997), about an adolescent girl named Rosie on the tennis circuit, for a different publication. I disagreed completely with the esteemed Benjamin Cheever’s complaint in The New York Times that nothing really happened in it . If you had any memory of being an adolescent girl, then that nothingness, which included a creepy spectator named Luther and a teen pregnancy, was everything.

Finding out “Crooked Little Heart” was a sequel to “Rosie” (1983), wherein the protagonist’s mother is widowed young and reckons with her alcoholism, was like walking through the wardrobe in “The Chronicles of Narnia” into a fictional world whose boundaries magically expand. A comparison more fitting when you realize that Lamott’s work, like C.S. Lewis’s, has a strong Christian subtext — when it’s not beckoning you right into the next pew.

Though religious, Lamott, a longtime member of a Bay Area Presbyterian church where she teaches Sunday school, is never holier-than-thou. If her fellow Californian Joan Didion slouched coolly towards Bethlehem, Lamott is forever fumbling toward transcendence, disclosing her baser impulses and littering profanities.

There is the indelible comparison, from “Rosie,” of professional jealousy to swallowing golf balls. In “Somehow” Lamott recalls envying another mom whose son is in medical school and modeling in Milan while Sam is at a low point, and her resentment of a female friend of a friend, with “perfect breasts, proud and immobile as the lions outside the New York Public Library.” (She can also be quite preoccupied with rear ends and jiggly arms.)

Didion’s California was ominous, remote, dry, chilly as an aperitif; Lamott’s is optimistic, accessible, earthy and — hand in hand with her Christianity — suffused with confessional recovery culture, warm as the cup of tea that is served at least half a dozen times in these pages. Only occasionally in “Somehow” does she invoke the bad old days, when she had to “all but army crawl across the floor of my houseboat to get us the platter of cocaine.”

In “Miami,” Didion wrote solemnly of Cuban exiles; in “Somehow,” Lamott takes a pleasure trip to Cuba with her newish husband , Neal Allen — though it’s not that pleasurable for her, because of the bad Wi-Fi — and encounters a pair of locals, wrapping “my aged imperialist running dog arms” around “the youthful ­ coffee-​colored socialist shoulders” of a young woman as they cavort in the surf, then discovering to her delight that her boyfriend is also in recovery, 12 years.

“Sí, sobrio. Alcohólicos Anónimos,” he tells her. “Bill Wilsonos!”

“Ay, caramba,” Lamott replies.

There’s no reason to persist with the daffy Didion comparison, except that both writers are mass-worshiped and occasionally scolded for their white privilege . Didion had dread ; Lamott has dreadlocks . Instead of reclusion and spareness and a frozen youthful image on tote bags , Lamott seems forever available, just next door, sharing the creaks of age and experience in the media ( including The Times ) and on social media — and churning out book after book after book.

Cross-eyed from my own toddlers — part of Lamott’s appeal, to women, is that she seems to guide you through life stages — I completely missed that “Crooked Little Heart” itself had a sequel, “Imperfect Birds” (2010). That no one has packaged this as “The Chronicles of Rosie” feels like a catalog failure — but also of a piece with Lamott’s rambling career, which has slowly covered the publishing landscape when you weren’t looking, like wisteria.

In a moment of interpersonal crisis, her husband reminds Lamott — with a cup of tea — that she has a diligent “inner critic” determined to keep her “small and worried.” Very probably, she doesn’t need an outer critic, even one who hastens to reassure that she loved the glints of old Lamott here, like pointing out seaside “a species of small octopus in pink chiffon who looks just like Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

More Gabor — I implore! Fewer repeat steepings.

“Operating Instructions” was followed by “ Some Assembly Required ” (2012), a fainter reprise with Lamott’s grandson, Jax. She has seemed to curtsy, titlewise at least, to Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster “Eat, Pray, Love” with “Help, Thanks, Wow” (2012) and “Dusk, Night, Dawn” (2021).

Though Didion wrote a play based on her best seller about grief, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she mercifully never was given the keys to the platform now known as X. Lamott got in hot water when she misgendered Caitlyn Jenner in 2015. She wrote about this already in “Hallelujah Anyway” (2017) and is still trying to clamber out, fretting in the new book’s title essay about a fund-raiser for a law firm that does pro bono work for L.G.B.T.Q. refugees. (In the next one—“Tweet by Tweet”?—maybe she can soothe Swifties peeved by her exhaustion with the pop star’s ubiquity.)

Slim as it is, “Somehow” is flabby and sometimes cringey, defining love variously as “how hope takes flight”; “a pond or a pool where we teach little kids to swim”; “a bench,” “a root system” and “a windbreaker, fashioned of people who sat and listened and got us tea.”

To be clear, I love Anne Lamott. But when she writes of how a friend with a fatal disease passed gas on a walk, and a visiting rabbi blowing a shofar on a houseboat deck reminded her of the flatulence, one does flash unkindly on the remark David Foster Wallace attributed to a lady of his acquaintance, re: another national treasure, John Updike : “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”

SOMEHOW : Thoughts on Love | By Anne Lamott | Riverhead | 208 pp. | $22

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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