Faber & Faber
September 2015
The Book of Memory is Petina Gappah’s first novel, a tightly woven tale of privilege and prison, of Zimbabwe, and of course memory. It is the fictional memoir of the convicted murderer, Memory. She has been asked to write in service of a potential appeal against her death sentence.
Memory is an albino woman. Sent away as a child from her home in one of Harare’s townships to live with a white man, Lloyd, she struggles to find a sense of belonging and of self. She feels neither black nor white; her birth family has rejected her; and with her Cambridge education she is at great odds with her fellows in the Chikurubi Prison. We see as she pieces together clues from her life, trying to work out how it arrived at this ugly point. Of course she professes her innocence of the murder. Continue reading