Livingstone’s Funeral
By Landeg White
Cinnamon Press 2010
UK Price: £8.99
Maria begins to piece together her family history during a dull Christmas visit to her grandmother after buying an African carving that she can’t resist. Discovering that Caroline, the long-suffering colonial wife whose letters are still kept, was not her great-grandmother, Maria begins a journey that pieces together the disparate narratives of this rich and intelligent novel, drawing together ‘people who cared not for nation or tribe but for the infinitely varied networks that were our common inheritance.’
An epic, yet intensely personal story of one young woman’s search for identity, revealing that ancestry is not always as it seems.