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ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- This is a hybrid sort of beast, based on Mawer's own family history and concentrating on ancestors who lived in the 19th century. He takes the bare details supported by official documents, the stories that have filtered down from long ago to become accepted facts, and weaves and imagines his own version of events, fleshing out the past in a rich and intriguing manner. There's Abraham who escapes the poverty of his Suffolk village, Naomi who is seduced by the first chancer she meets, George who is in the army and Annie, the fearless Irish lass who he marries. At times it does read like non-fiction, but then is enlivened by imagined conversations and emotions. I'm not usually a fan of this sort of thing, but Mawer does it very well indeed! Lindy
The past is another country and we are all its exiles. Banished forever, we look back in fascination and wonder at this mysterious land. Who were the people who populated it?
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, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city... George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Foot, 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. They lived, loved, felt joy and fear, and ultimately died. But who were they? And what indissoluble thread binds them together?
Simon Mawer's compelling and original novel puts flesh on our ancestors' bones to bring them to life and give them voice. He has created stories that are gripping and heart-breaking, from the squalor and vitality of Dickensian London to the excitement of seafaring in the last days of sail and the horror of the trenches of the Crimea. 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.
Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus and in Malta. He then moved to Italy, where he and his family lived for more than thirty years, and taught at the British International School in Rome. He and his wife currently live in Hastings. Simon Mawer is the author of several novels including the Man Booker shortlisted The Glass Room, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and Tightrope.
ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- This is a hybrid sort of beast, based on Mawer's own family history and concentrating on ancestors who lived in the 19th century. He takes the bare details supported by official documents, the stories that have filtered down from long ago to become accepted facts, and weaves and imagines his own version of events, fleshing out the past in a rich and intriguing manner. There's Abraham who escapes the poverty of his Suffolk village, Naomi who is seduced by the first chancer she meets, George who is in the army and Annie, the fearless Irish lass who he marries. At times it does read like non-fiction, but then is enlivened by imagined conversations and emotions. I'm not usually a fan of this sort of thing, but Mawer does it very well indeed! Lindy
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 *
