Петина Гаппа3.5 The story you have asked me to tell begins not with the ignominious ugliness of Lloyd's death but on a long-ago day in April when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. I say my father and my mother, but really it was just my mother.
Memory, the narrator of The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has been convicted of murder. As part of her appeal her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers?
Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between the past and the present, Memory weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate and the treachery of memory.
William has a good, steady job in retail. He works in the bedlinen department of an Oxford Street store. He knows everything there is to know about comfy.
Lucy has a portfolio career which, in her view, is no kind of career at all. Her life is a mess, her love life even more unsatisfactory than that. She wouldn’t be comfortable if she sat on a sofa in Heal’s. Unable to sleep, she thinks a new pillow might be the answer.
William and Lucy are not connected. Yet the pair of them share a terrible memory from the past, the sort of joint recollection that changes with the light, depending on who you were and where you were standing at the time.
The question is: what to do with it?
Pillow Man is a London novel of our uneasy times. It has love in it and darkness. It sets lonely tunes to a broken backbeat. It marries life to death. Crucially, it explores the difficult metaphysics of bedtime.
What, after all, do we really mean by ‘thread-count’?
Второе место.