Memento Mori

Memento Mori is a novel by the Scottish author Muriel Spark, published by Macmillan in 1959. Its title is Latin for remember you must die, a common trope that the book represents through a series of insidious telephone calls made to Dame Lettie Colston and her acquaintances.

The plot follows a circle of elderly upper-class Britons and their acquaintances, with a third-person omniscient narrator moving between several of them. The centre of the group is Dame Lettie, who has retired from extensive work in prison reform; her brother Godfrey is the heir to and retired head of a brewing company, and the other major characters are connected to them socially and financially. Dame Lettie is seventy-nine and has spent her working life in penal reform, and the calls reach people who are already thinking about their own endings, which is what makes the voice effective.

The recipients of the calls spend the book trying to work out who is making them and why, and in doing so they reflect on their past lives, so the mystery is a device for disclosing character rather than an end in itself.