She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me by Emma Brockes

(Penguin, $27)

“In the hands of any halfway decent author, this would be an incredible story,” said Viv Groskop in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). A young woman fleeing South Africa in 1960 smuggles an antique pistol into England. She soon has a daughter, and across the next four decades tells her beloved only child virtually nothing about the past that the gun represents. But when the mother dies, the daughter goes looking and discovers that she deeply underestimated her mother’s bravery and resilience. Fortunately, Emma Brockes is the daughter in question, and she’s a better than decent author. She’s written “basically the perfect memoir.” The moment I finished it, “I turned back to the first page and started again.”

You can’t help but admire Brockes’s mother, Paula, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Her father was a convicted murderer who repeatedly raped Paula and her younger sisters. She struck back years later by having him arrested for raping her 12-year-old half sister, but—acting as his own attorney—he grilled his children on cross-examination and won acquittal. Paula responded by buying a pearl-handled revolver and shooting him five times; when he survived, she left for England. Judging from the portrait her daughter has created, she became a genius parent—possessed of a “tart, post-colonial sangfroid” that made her daughter feel protected and admired, yet never coddled.

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“As you do with the best writers, you feel lucky to be in Brockes’s company,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. “The ocean of her prose has the right amount of whitecaps.” She describes her mother, for instance, as “a little like the Enigma machine, ticking over for months and years, trying every possible mathematical combination until she cracked a way to live.” The book’s title is misleading: Paula didn’t leave her gun to Emma. But that’s just about the only false note in a story “full of intellect and feeling and dart-like expression”—a memoir that “reminds you why you liked memoirs in the first place.”