Product Description

A dying woman leaves a sealed box for her baby daughter. Years later, as a young woman, the daughter Catherine finds the mysterious box, addressed to her, full of unexplained objects, and she starts to unpack the story of a woman whom she never knew but who has cast a shadow over her life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1012937 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 276 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"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

Customer Reviews

Well written but too rambling
The idea of this story is so good that I couldn't wait to read it. A girl, Catherine, is left a box by her mother, who died when she was a baby. Catherine discovers this box when she is thirty-one, the same age as when her mother had died. Inside the box are eleven objects, all of them meaningless at first, but when Catherine begins to examine each object, she finds new truths, not only about her mother, but about herself and her stern Aunt Isabella. Through these objects, Catherine finds that her mother was not the sweet and innocent woman that everyone likes to remember her as.
However, when I came to read it, the narrative is so full of (to me) irrelevant ramblings that I found myself skimming certain parts, just to get to a bit that might reveal something of what the memory box was intended to do. The book is obviously well-written but, as another reviewer put it, don't read it unless you are used to heavy-going reading!

Well written but a chore to read.
Although it is obvious from the opening page that Foster is an excellant writer, this book is too heavy and depressing even for someone like me, who usually soaks up anything with a bit of real depth.
It seems as if Foster is trying to convey the multitude of feelings her heroine is exeperiencing, and in many ways she succeeds, but it felt to me like she was playing with depth when infact the characterisations were decidely shallow.
I struggled not to put the book down in frustration and boredom, and when I had finally finished it I was left with that terrible downer you can only get from a disappointing read.
If you're looking for something superficially 'deep' and angst ridden then read this book. Otherwise give it a miss.

good idea - irritating style
There's a wonderful central idea here,but I found Forster's prose style really got up my nose on occasions. For example, far too many dramatic verbs - people are forever rushing and jumping about the place. The central character is a spoilt brat it's quite difficult to feel sympathy for, and the other characters (with the exception of the dead mother)seem laboured over but not convincing. Too many happy coincidences make the plot creak - the heroine just so happens to get a job in Scotland when the storyline requires her to etc. etc. If you want a vindictive tale of a young woman and how she deals with her family/ past, try Lorna sage's Bad Blood, a much better book than this.