The Memory of Love: Summary and book reviews of The Memory of Love by Linda Olsson, plus links to an excerpt from The Memory of Love and a biography of Linda Olsson.
The Memory of Love
by Linda Olsson
Paperback: Feb 2013,
240 pages.
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. (Reviewed by Sarah Sacha Dollacker).
Publishers Weekly
Olsson’s eloquent prose offers an intimate, poignant portrait of a woman at midlife who finds her way back…to a life filled with love.
Booklist
[A] deeply poetic novel...and a credit to Olsson’s narrative technique…Fans of Jennifer Haigh and Heidi W. Durrow will appreciate this darkly emotional novel.
Mahrangimatters (New Zealand)
Olsson successfully intertwines New Zealand and Sweden to create a beautiful and compelling story.
Weekend Herald (New Zealand)
[A] tender, loving story ... concerned with searching and healing...You sense an author of real integrity.
The Star (New Zealand)
One of the most stirring and sensitive books I have read for a long time... An outstanding read
Listener (New Zealand)
Olsson's lyrical style is perfectly suited to the reflective tenderness that characterises Marion's narrative voice. . . . The tragedies of the novel, combined with the powerful resonance of the windswept and lonely coast, makes [The Memory of Love] a heavily atmospheric novel of great emotional weight.
Sunday Star Times (New Zealand)
The emotional weather of the story is changeable and dramatic, with storm clouds sometimes threatening, unpredictable tides and winds of inner conflict, and chance meetings.
Gisborne Herald (New Zealand)
Linda Olsson writes beautifully, capturing the fragile nature of her characters and the beauty of the rugged landscape around her with great precision and subtlety.
Otago Times (New Zealand)
Haunting and beautiful, [The Memory of Love] is a reminder of the fragility of happiness and the impossibility of living without hope.
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 Maori descendents and culture. Hulme practiced law and picked tobacco before becoming a...
A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family.
Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild is a heart-stopping and original debut.
These are 2 of the 7 readalike suggestions for The Memory of Love. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
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From the first page, I was drawn in by the lyrical writing of the author and mesmerized as the narrator, eight year old Raami, remembered the years...
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Kenn Nesbitt is new Children's Poet Laureate(Jun 12 2013) Kenn Nesbitt has been named the new Children's Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children's Poetry to the Poetry Foundation, which noted that the two-year position...
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(1146 words).
Publishers Weekly
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 Maori descendents and culture. Hulme practiced law and picked tobacco before becoming a...
