The Memory of Love
A Novel
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From the beloved author of Astrid & Veronika, a moving tale of friendship and redemption
Fans of Astrid & Veronika and Chris Cleave's Little Bee will be thrilled to read Linda Olsson's third novel. Here is Olsson 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alternating between events on an isolated beach in New Zealand and a traumatic childhood in Sweden, this sentimental ode to love lost and found from Olsson (Sonata for Miriam) is a touching, if far-fetched, tale. Marion, a newly retired family doctor, has shut herself out from the world in her coastal home, where her main pastime is gazing at the ocean. Marion finds new purpose, however, after Ika, an introverted young boy trapped in an abusive home, unexpectedly enters her life. The author's prose is at times pinched and lapidary, while at others, effusive and overstated, and sometimes both: "The coffee is hot and strong, the scones fresh. It is a superb breakfast." On the other hand, Olsson handles Marion and Ika's story in a beautifully natural fashion, though the long arm of fate is extravagantly elongated in a tragic subplot, involving an ill-starred affair in Marion's earlier life, that would put Thomas Hardy to shame.
Customer Reviews
The Memory of Love
You are a magnificent writer! Good Luck to you and you family. Strength to you as a writer and more importantly as a Mother.