Meet Sierra Leonean raised author Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow, and raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She writes about the civil war in Sierra Leone, and her book, The Memory of Love, set in the year 2000 is one of the six books shortlisted for this year’s Warwick Prize of Writing. The Warwick Prize for Writing is an international cross-disciplinary prize, worth £50,000, which will be awarded March 22nd 2011.
Her new novel The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury), published in April 2010, is a story about friendship, war and obsessive love. It has been selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and Times.
About the book:
Adrian Lockheart is a psychologist escaping his life in England. Arriving in Freetown in the wake of civil war, he struggles with the intensity of the heat, dirt and dust, and with the secrets this country hides. Despite the gulf of experience and understanding between them, Adrian finds unexpected friendship in a young surgeon at the hospital, the charismatic Kai Mansaray, and begins to build a new life just as Kai makes plans to leave.
In the hospital Adrian encounters an elderly and unwell man, Elias Cole, who is reflecting on his past, not all of it noble. Recorded in a series of notebooks are memories of his youth, the optimism of the first moon landings, and the details of an obsession: Saffia, a woman he loved, and Julius, her fiery, rebellious husband.
As their individual stories entwine across two generations in a country torn apart by repression and war, some distances cannot be bridged. The Memory of Love is a towering tale of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, superbly realised and beautifully written, horrifying and exhilarating, unflinching and tender, moving and uplifting. It is the story of four lives colliding; a story about friendship, about understanding, absolution and the indelible effects of the past; about journeys and dreams and loss, and about the very nature of love. Bloomsbury
Click on the following link to view Aminatta’s interview by BBC’s Nick Highman about her book The Memory of Love http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12778416
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