The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone)

I’ve read 11 books so far this summer, and this review of Aminatta Forna’s 2010 The Memory of Love is review number 8.

Forna was born in Scotland to a Scottish mother and Sierra Leonean father. However, she spent much of her childhood in Sierra Leone, where her activist father was murdered by the authorities when she was 11 (and which she has written about in her memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water).

Forna’s novels are often interested in how people deal with trauma (I’ve previously read her 2018 novel, Happiness), and The Memory of Love, published in 2010, is no exception, set in an unnamed Sierra Leone, against a background of lives marked by unrest and civil conflict.

The story has a dual timeline, each featuring an intense love triangle. The first thread of the story focuses on the memories of a dying man…