Aminatta Forna discusses her novel The Memory of Love with James Naughtie and a group of readers.

The Memory of Love has as its background three decades of unrest and violence in Sierra Leone, Aminatta Forna's father's home country and the one where she mostly grew up.

The story deals with two sets of relationships, centering around the University teacher Elias Cole fifty years ago, at the time of unrest, and in the early years of this century after the civil war. In 1969 Elias falls in love at first sight with a colleague’s wife, which will affect many around him – her husband, other colleagues, and eventually his psychiatrist Adrian Lockheart who is treating him in the present day. Adrian is the figure who links them all and his investigations into the relationships among all those who’ve experienced war, and are among its victims, is the spine of the story.

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Presenter : James Naughtie

October's Bookclub Choice : The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017)