The Memory of Love

The Memory of Love is a novel by the British-Sierra Leonean writer Aminatta Forna, published in 2010. It was included on the Big Jubilee Read list of seventy books by Commonwealth writers in 2022.

The book is set in Sierra Leone as the decade-long civil war ends and takes three men in turn. Elias Cole is an academic who is dying in hospital and who keeps returning to his account of Saffia, the woman he loved, and Julius, her husband, and to what he did about it. Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist who arrives in the country to work at the hospital and who has his own reasons for having left home. Kai Mansaray is a local surgeon who treats the people the war damaged and who is trying to build a house outside the city. Their stories are told in interlocking sections, and the novel is interested in how the war is carried by the people who survived it rather than in the fighting itself.

Forna has written about Sierra Leone and its civil war in both fiction and memoir, and this novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.