When Petina Gappah won the Guardian first book award with her short story collection An Elegy for Easterly in 2009, she cheerfully told an interviewer that her first novel was due out in two years’ time. Last week she was back in London to launch that novel, The Book of Memory. Why did it take her so long? “It’s been six incredibly long years,” she agrees. “Part of the problem I had is that the first book was so much more successful than I could have anticipated, which created expectations in my own mind. I was terrified that I was going to be found out: that I was this impostor. I had so much self-doubt. It was the same doubt that stopped me being published at all till I was 37.”
As she chatters on her way to the photo shoot, blithely halting the traffic as she crosses a busy London road, it’s hard to imagine this effervescent woman in the grip of a confidence crisis. But she wasn’t suffering from a simple case of second book syndrome. The journey from Elegy to The Book of Memory involved a three-year career break. It carried her back from Geneva, where she had been working as a lawyer while raising her son by herself, to the midst of a Zimbabwean family that boasts 200 direct descendants of her grandparents.
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