United by themes of family and kin, this masterly collection of stories from the Booker-shortlisted author of The Glass Room brings individuals from the past to vibrant life through bravura storytelling.
Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea ... Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, imagines a new life in the big city ... George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Food, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms.
Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough.
Simon Mawer puts flesh on our ancestors' bones to bring them to life and give them voice. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit. Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known - the unbreakable bond of family.
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9780349144979
Number of pages: 432
Weight: 329 g
Dimensions: 196 x 124 x 32 mm
Utterly absorbing... so cleverly constructed and beautifully written - The Times
Moving and exhilarating - Spectator
Gripping... an intriguing blend of archival research and fictionalised accounts of the life histories of his own forebears... I won't forget these women whose DNA he is so proud of inheriting, or the voices he conjures for them... They were anything but ordinary - Financial Times
Mawer writes movingly about the privations of military life and the hardships endured by women in the Victorian era... His prose is measured and elegant - Sunday Times
Told with brio, the gutsy narrative evokes the messiness and fragility of everyday life in the nineteenth century... I was moved by Mawer's defense of storytelling as a vital tool of historical recovery - Daily Mail
An astonishing blend of historical fiction and imaginative non-fiction, Ancestry is a book that will stay with me forever... A beautiful, haunting and extremely moving testament to what men and women without means or agency must endure to keep their families together and what we owe - and can learn from them - in turn - Natalie Jenner
Abraham lives an impoverished life in Suffolk. He cannot read or write but he dreams of more and is finally apprenticed to become a seaman. Naomi has moved to London to become a dressmaker but fate has more in... More
Mawer’s new book is part historical fiction and part non-fiction. The one thing that connects all the characters in the book is that they are all real ancestors in the author’s family. The names are real taken from... More
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