The Longest Memory

The Longest Memory is a short novel by the Guyana-born British writer Fred D'Aguiar, published in 1994 and his first work of fiction.

The book runs to about a hundred and forty pages and is set between 1790 and 1810, and it tells its story through a series of voices rather than one narrator: the father, his son, the planter, the planter's daughter, an overseer and a slave-catcher all take a chapter, and they write in different forms, including verse, a diary and a passage in the second person. One chapter is given over entirely to fabricated editorials from a local newspaper, which is how the book lets the reader hear the slaveholding public language of the period. D'Aguiar came to fiction from poetry, and the brevity and the compression of the sentences show it. The betrayal at the centre of the plot is committed out of love as much as fear, and the novel is careful about the difference between the two, which is what has kept it on school and university reading lists since it was published.