The Memory Box by Margaret Forster

"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?

Publisher:	Chatto & Windus
Year:	1999
Binding:	Hardback
ISBN:	9780701168933
Condition:	Very Good
Description:	DJ. Stamped 'review copy' on title page.

Note: This image is from a stock photo and may differ from the actual cover.

SKU: 1587606
Location: Fiction