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Book Reviewed by: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.
Linda Olsson’s story unfolds slowly, like a shell emptying sand, and just as that shell exposes its inner secrets, so too does the tale. The artful storytelling and transfixing characters creates a beautiful novel, one that passes from unhappiness to hope and regret to joy...continued
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(Reviewed by Sarah Sacha Dollacker).
The Memory of Love is mainly set in New Zealand where Swedish author Linda Olsson spends half the year. She spends the other half in her native Sweden. Olsson's novels have enjoyed worldwide readership, something, she says that most New Zealand authors rarely experience. There are brilliant New Zealand writers, Olsson says, whom many in the larger English-reading world have not heard of. Here are three to put on your to-read list:
Keri Hulme was born in 1947 to Scottish, English and Maori (native inhabitants of New Zealand) parentage, Hulme's only novel The Bone People, won the Man Booker Prize in 1985. As of 2012, she is the only New Zealander to win this coveted prize. The Bone People analyzes the intersection between European and...
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