The Book of Memory review – a vivid life story from death row

Petina Gappah’s powerful novel presents us with the recollections of a Zimbabwean woman waiting to be executed for the murder of her adopted father

Petina Gappah powerfully probes the tricksy nature of memory through the story of Memory, or Mnemosyne, an albino woman consigned to Chikurubi prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, convicted of murdering a wealthy white man, Lloyd, her adopted father. She is the first woman in more than 20 years to be sentenced to death. As part of her appeal, she begins writing down her memories of what happened; her notebooks form the novel. Gappah, who won the Guardian first book award in 2009, is also a lawyer, her knowledge brought to bear in this story about the struggle for justice.

“I spent much of my life trying to be invisible,” says Memory, documenting the physical and emotional pains of being an outsider: how her albino skin blistered in the sun; how she was brutally bullied; how she wanted to crawl out of her own skin, “to disappear, to melt and only observe”. Gappah brilliantly exposes the gulf between rich and poor, for when Memory was nine years old her parents sold her to Lloyd and she moved from an impoverished township, Mufakose, to a grand house. “Crippled by fear and longing for home, I was saved by books,” she says. “I discovered books that became as necessary to me as breathing.”

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