Ignore the title, with its subliminal echoes of Mills & Boon. Aminatta Forna’s magnificent second novel is not really about love. Its themes are far grittier, and all the more compelling for it: war, loss, and how a society emerging from civil strife must reinvent its own history, fabricating a tolerable narrative in order to remain semi sane.
The country in question is Sierra Leone. Its charming capital, Freetown, dotted anomalously with chimney-potted villas recalling an era when this was a British colony, is framed by green hills which tumble into a beach-fringed sea. It doesn’t attract many tourists, though. For Sierra Leone has in recent decades proved a rich source of the nightmarish images that make more stable societies blench: drugged-up rebel forces, conscience-free child fighters, the casual amputations of civilian hands and feet.
Adrian Lockheart, a British psychologist suffering from professional and personal aimlessness, relocates to Freetown. There, he befriends Kai Mansaray, a driven local surgeon, and becomes de facto father confessor to Elias Cole, a history professor whose lungs are gradually giving way.
Adrian takes a while to warm up to the country, much like the narrative itself — this was the one segment of the book where I felt some pruning might have been in order.
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