When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it. A few years later, she and her brother finally did. Nick, an absent father, was a wouldbe writer and backtothelander who lived off the grid in Northern California. Nicks own father, Gawen also absent had been a wellborn Englishman who wrote a Bloomsburylike novel about lesbian lovers, before moving to Kenya and ultimately dying a mysterious death at age twentyseven. Brownrigg was told Gawen had likely died by suicide. Reconstructing Gawens short, colourful life from revelations in the package takes her through glamorous 1930s London and staid Pasadena, toward the last gasp of the British Empire in Kenya, and from there, deep into the California redwoods, where Nick later carved out a rugged path in the wilderness, keeping his English past at bay. Vividly weaving together the lives of her father and grandfather, through memory and imagination, Brownrigg explores issues of sexuality and silences, and childhoods fractured by divorce. In her uncovering of this lost family, she writes movingly of daughterhood and of parenthood, gradually making her own story whole.

Binding: Paperback;336 pages; Publisher: Turnaround Pub. Serv. Ltd; Classification: BM; Weight: 458 g; Dimensions: 210 x 141 x 25

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