Ancestry

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION

“Utterly absorbing, cleverly constructed, beautifully written - The TimesOut of the ordinary . . . gripping - Financial Times”

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

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 while he taught at the British International School in Rome. He and his wife currently divide their time between Italy and Hastings. Simon Mawer is the author of several novels including the Man Booker shortlisted The Glass Room, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, Tightrope and Prague Spring.

This book defies categorisation. It's a history, it's a novel, almost it's a kind of archaeology, an investigation into the reality of the past and an exploration of that uncertain borderland which lies between fact and fiction. Using archive material Mawer has picked through the traces left behind by his mid-nineteenth-century ancestors to find out how they might have been and what might have happened to them. There were few artefacts - a funeral notice, a Crimean War campaign medal - handed down through the generations because these men and women possessed so little, no diaries or letters largely because they were illiterate. In fact there is nothing much to show that they were once alive beyond those traces that are common to all families: entries in registers of birth, marriage and death, census data and occasional hints in newspapers.Yet this is no dry history. While taking care never to step outside the bounds of historical evidence, Mawer has put flesh and blood on the bare bones, employing the skills of a novelist to reconstruct long-dead ancestors and give them voice. The result is gripping and heart-breaking, imbued with the vitality of Dickensian London, the atmosphere of seafaring in the days when sail was just beginning to give way to steam, and the terror of trench warfare in the Crimea. There is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit. Above all there is the bloody-minded courage of the women who, as their men fell by the wayside, carried the family forward from Victorian revolution into the twentieth century.

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