Book Cover Image of The Book of Memory: A Novel by Petina Gappah

The Book of Memory: A Novel
by Petina Gappah

Publication Date: Feb 02, 2016
List Price: $26.00
Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780865479074
Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
Parent Company: Holtzbrinck Publishing Group

Description of The Book of Memory: A Novel by Petina Gappah


The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man.Memory, the narrator of Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, after being sentenced for murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers?Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between past and present, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning writer Petina Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.



book cover The Book of Memory: A Novel by Petina GappahBooks similiar to The Book of Memory: A Novel may be found in the categories below: