The Memory Box - Hardcover

Forster, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701168935 ISBN 13: 9780701168933

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1999

Synopsis

"Susannah was apparently perfect, as the dead so often become": Margaret Forster's The Memory Box opens with the challenge which runs right through this book. How do you get to know the dead? How can the dead make you get to know them? In this case, by leaving a box of strange, and disconnected, objects through which a daughter, Catherine, learns to trace the contours of her mother's life and the depths of her own loss in never having known her. Susannah, her mother, died when Catherine was six months old; she is brought up, happily, by her father and step-mother. Only on their deaths does she open the "memory box" and enter into the everyday complexity (there's no melodrama here) of her family life. Was Susannah perfect? And why did her loving husband marry so soon after her death? What has Catherine missed in never having known her? Critically acclaimed for, amongst others, Lady's Maid and Mothers' Boys , Forster brings a keen, and unsentimental, eye to her (at times remarkably painful) topic. She is, also, the biographer of Daphne du Maurier, and Forster has taken on her legacy of menace and romance (think of Rebecca ) in this intelligent, and compelling, novel. -- Vicky Lebeau

About this title

About the Author

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster is the author of many previous novels including LADY'S MAID, MOTHER'S BOYS and SHADOW BABY. She has also written bestselling works of non-fiction, including biographies of Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and HIDDEN LIVES and PRECIOUS LIVES about her own family. She lives in London and the Lake District.

From AudioFile

After both her father and stepmother die, Catherine finally brings herself to open the box that her birth mother left for her before dying when Catherine was six months old. As she traces each item's meaning and pieces together her mother's short life story, Catherine herself changes. This is an introspective novel, with almost no action and little dialogue. In the hands of a different reader it could have been very boring. However, the quality of Clare Higgins's voice is well suited to the story. She portrays the Scottish voices flawlessly, doing particularly well with the men's voices, and modulates Catherine's voice so that it never drones or bores the listener. This is an example of a superb performance enhancing a rather ordinary novel. S.S.R. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701168935
• ISBN 13: 9780701168933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276