Book Review and Reflection of The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Introduction

Three men, three stories and a spectacular entanglement. You will start this book, and you will not want to put it down. The several plot twists alone will keep you on your toes, reading chapter after chapter.

I first read The Memory of Love in 2018 and knew I would revisit it one day. When I began reviewing books on African Queens’ Ink, I knew it was time to finally re-read the book and reflect on it in writing.

Book Summary

Set in Sierra Leone, The Memory of Love follows the stories of three men who become intrinsically linked:

Elias Cole,
Kai Mansaray and
Adrian Lockheart

Predominantly and especially in the first few chapters, it is Elias’s story that we get to learn about. On his deathbed, he is determined to tell his story to an English psychologist on a temporary placement in Sierra Leone – Adrian. Elias leaves no stone unturned as he seeks to absolve himself of events during his life that have changed the lives of others.

He starts as a young academic lecturer with an ambition to grow in his field. He was on his own and had no family to speak of, and he was quite happy being in his own company most of the time. However, Elias began socialising uncharacteristically because of his instant obsession with Saffia, his colleague Julius’s wife.

Elias drew close to Julius, not because of a yearning desire for friendship but because Julius was the link to his obsession, Saffia. From the moment he first saw her, Elias was instantly and completely taken by her. So obsessed was he that he began stalking her, showing up at places she would be and arriving at her home unannounced when he knew Julius was not there. Eventually, Saffia started becoming uncomfortable around Elias as she slowly began to realise what he was doing.

Saffia, however, only had eyes for Julius. This fact did not deter Elias from obsessing and stalking her. The story kept getting darker and darker as Elias told it, and in a very cruel twist of fate for Saffia (and I suppose a lucky break for Elias), Saffia ended up marrying him—a matter of survival for her, but a matter of immense, though short-lived joy for Elias.

As Elias played his cards quite well politically, he became well aligned, including the Dean of his faculty and the police. As such, he became quite successful in his career while many of his “friends” and former colleagues did not make it. While Saffia never warmed to him, theirs was a long marriage, broken only by Saffia’s terrible death. But out of it came the birth of their daughter, who, in turn, became romantically involved with Adrian, the man to whom Elias poured his life story.

Adrian was a successful psychologist in London, married with a daughter, but he began to question his life. He started feeling like something was missing, after which he decided to go to Sierra Leone, a country connected to his mother’s past, to help people affected by the civil war.

By chance, Adrian meets Kai, a trauma surgeon who used Adrian’s rented but formerly empty house as a place to rest and recover in between gruelling shifts at the hospital. The two strike up a friendship that grows and connects them forever. However, their friendship was interrupted when both men discovered that they were in love with the same woman, Elias Cole’s daughter.

Known to Adrian as MamaKay, Kai only ever called her by her real name, Nenebah, whenever he spoke about this woman whom he loved. Due to this, Adrian never realised that his MamaKay was Kai’s Nenebah. Kai and Nenebah were each other’s soulmates. However, things did not work out between them, even though their love never died. So when Adrian met her, becoming enchanted by her at first sight, Kai and Nenebah had long ended things.

I have spent the better half of this year reading stories about African women. This book, being centred on the lives of men, was a different reading experience. I did, however, feel that Kai’s story was not as well-developed as Elias Cole’s or Adrian’s. I finished the book wanting to know more about Kai and where life would take him next. His character was strong and interesting. But his story felt somewhat incomplete for me

Elias Cole’s character was unbelievable. His audacity and deception, the subtle but not-so-subtle ways he ruined almost everybody’s lives, were uncanny. He had a hand in destroying and diverting so many people’s life courses, and on his deathbed, he still felt like he had done nothing wrong.

This was the first Sierra Leonean-based book I read, and it was so good that back in 2018, I immediately read Aminatta Forna’s memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (2002), which I will be re-reading and reviewing soon.

I also have her other novels on my to-be-read list:
Ancestor Stones (2006)
The Hired Man (2013)
Happiness (2018)
The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion (2021)

Recommendation
5/5 – Everybody should read this book.

About the Author

Aminatta Forna is an award-winning Scottish and Sierra Leonean author known for her fiction and nonfiction works that often explore themes of memory, conflict, and identity. Forna’s work has received international recognition, including the Windham-Campbell Prize and shortlisting for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Baileys Prize.

Beyond writing, she has held academic roles at prestigious institutions, including Georgetown University and Bath Spa University, and her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and The Times. Her background as the daughter of a prominent Sierra Leonean politician and her experiences across continents shape her nuanced storytelling.

Reference
Forna, A. (n.d.). About Aminatta Forna. Retrieved June 28, 2025, from https://aminattaforna.com/about-aminatta-forna.html

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