Identical twins are always a source of fascination, and Jacqueline Roy’s novel charts the lives of a pair, Selina and Zora, who seem even closer than most. “We were joined at the hip – that’s not a metaphor,” insists Zora, in a striking first line; she claims to remember the operation that severed their tiny, conjoined bodies as babies. But separating herself emotionally from her sister in adulthood will prove more difficult.
Zora and Selina are born to a white mother and Black father in south London. We get two accounts of growing up there in the 1950s and 1960s, and the casual – and not-so-casual – racism their family faced. The twins experience a series of increasingly dramatic events, with twists and revelations that can feel a touch soapy. But the way personal traumas are bound up with racial and class prejudice forms a tight thread through the narrative.
Events are set in motion by the arrival of a beautiful, charismatic, untrustworthy stranger into a previously private world; although that mysterious stranger is just a nine-year-old girl. Lydia plays the twins off against each other as children, and later seduces Zora and older brother Cal.
Roy has written several books for children and young adults, and The Memory of Us is often plainly and pacily written, even if it tends towards overexplaining, especially in the dialogue. Interspersed with the twins’ life stories are the present-day experiences of Selina, now in her 70s and with dementia. These fragmentary chapters shuffle between Selina’s confused day-to-day existence and her hazy memories.
Introducing memory loss to complicate a story is a technique rich with potential – used brilliantly by Florian Zeller in The Father, for instance – and Roy manipulates Selina’s dementia to add a sense of a mystery to be solved. It’s an interesting idea but one that doesn’t always work. Selina gets in touch with Lydia, hoping she will fill the gaps around certain key life events. But rather than just asking her burning questions, Selina hides her disease, prolonging the intrigue but stretching plausibility. For the reader, it’s just as satisfying following the chronological story – which continually spirals around the central question of how Selina and Zora can live with, or without, each other.
In Memory of Us by Jacqueline Roy is published by Simon & Schuster (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy oat guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
