The Memory of Love

This prize-winning literary novel is set during the civil war in Sierra Leone. For some readers, such books can be dry or inaccessible in print. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's delivery creates a smoldering tale of mounting danger. His baritone is rich, deeply infusing the characters with liveliness. He varies his pitch and pace to depict the female characters and their dialogue. Holdbrook-Smith's diction is precise, enunciated, and deliberate, and his slight British accent underscores the colonial history of the story's setting. The overall effect is rather like watching a "Masterpiece Contemporary" episode. M.R. (c) AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine


Susan Lyons creates a believable accent for Marion Flint, a Swedish retired doctor who is living on an isolated beach in New Zealand. Linda Olsson's beautiful prose intertwines the story of Marion's past and an account of her unexpected maternal love for a mildly autistic boy named Ika, who is living with his abusive grandmother. Lyons adopts a fitting quality of reserve for Marion, who fears she could lose Ika so that his grandmother can keep her access to welfare. A subtle change of tone adds a dreamy note for the flashbacks to Marion's traumatic childhood and her doomed love affairs. The flattened vowels of the myriad New Zealand characters are adequate; it is Lyons's portrayal of a solitary woman finding unforeseen joy that is perfect. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

September 6, 2010
Forma, recipient of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Ancestor Stones, returns to Africa's troubled conscience in this admirable if uneven outing. Adrian Lockheart is a well-meaning English psychologist who embarks on a temporary post at a Sierra Leone hospital intending to modernize treatment of the long-neglected schizophrenics, transients, and scarred victims of civil war who walk the hospital grounds. He soon meets his match in the elderly ex-professor Elias Cole, who speaks eloquently of his country's turbulent history—and also of his passion for the wife of a more radically minded colleague whose eventual disappearance Cole may be implicated in. As the holes in Elias's story widen, Adrian falls for a patient's daughter and into conflict with a surgeon, and ripples from the unexamined past threaten the present. Yet Forma's material doesn't measure up to the book's length. The book's prolixity, combined with scenes that drag or come off as forced, certainly doesn't ruin the experience, but it does occasionally glut what amounts to a heartening cry for moral responsibility in the thick of maddening injustice.