A review by drjoannehill
The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah

5.0

Written as a diary of a woman on death row in Zimbabwe. She recounts how she ended up where she is. The title of the book is appropriate in a few ways. The character's name is memory, but Gappah also plays with the concept of memory and how we remember things differently at different times: there are different tellings of the same event from the character's history, showing that memory is imperfect: and at the the end of the book she realises she has misremembered a significant event in her life that has shaped how she has acted ever since. Recent political events in Rhodesia / Zimbabwe play a minor role. It would be useful to know something of the country's history or look things up while reading!