Motherlands: In Search of Our Inherited Cities (Hardback)

A brilliant exploration of mixed heritage … Gacioppo traces her ancestral footsteps through four cities; Turin, Benghazi, Rome and Palermo … Sometimes, when Gacioppo hits a wall in her efforts to reach back in time, her solution is to enter a reverie in which she imagines what happened. These passages are deliciously written, rich and evocative. They sparkle even amid the crystalline prose of Motherlands as a whole - Guardian

The idea of home - whether real or imagined - animates this blend of memoir and history . . . and the result is unusual, intimate, and often moving - Matt Elton, BBC History Magazine

Motherlands by Amaryllis Gacioppo (Bloomsbury, £20) is an appropriately hard-to-pin-down sort of book from a writer gifted with multiple heritages surveying the landscapes of her own and her family’s pasts. Note: pasts necessarily in the plural, like those titular motherlands. My favourite books of this type find the big questions (belonging, memory etc) in small, concrete things: an old photo, an old building, a map. It’s not a new approach, but few do it this well. - Daniel Hahn, Spectator