A moving, compelling tale of love and obsession from Zimbabwean-born writer Petina Gappah
Narrator Memory is an albino woman who is incarcerated in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, convicted of murder. She is accused of killing her adoptive father, Lloyd Hendricks, and is told to write down the details of the event as they happened. Moving between the lives of the affluent and those who struggle daily to buy a loaf of bread, she weaves a tale about the relentlessness of fate and the treachery of memory.
“The story you have asked me to tell begins not with the ignominious ugliness of Lloyd’s death, but on a long-ago day in April when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. I say my father and my mother, but really it was just my mother.” With these words the stage is set.
She feels no remorse for Lloyd’s death as she takes the reader into a space where memory seems vague and unpredictable. A beautiful read that makes you think about how your own life, and the pain of loss and love.
