Overview

A quest is never what you expect it to be. Elizabeth Madeline Martin spends her days in a retirement home in Cape Town, watching the pigeons and squirrels on the branches of a tree outside her window. Bedridden, her memory fading, she can recall her early childhood spent in a small wood-and-iron house in Blackridge on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Though she remembers the place in detail - dogs, a mango tree, a stream - she has no idea where exactly it is. 'My memory is full of blotches, ' she tells her daughter Julia, 'like ink left about and knocked over.' Julia resolves to find the Blackridge house: with her mother unsettled, lonely and confused, would this, perhaps, bring some measure of closure? So begins a journey that traverses family history, forgotten documents, old photographs, and the maps that stake out a country's troubled past. Kind strangers, willing to assist in the search, lead to unexpected discoveries of ancestors and wars and lullabies. Folded into this quest are the tender conversations between a daughter and a mother who does not have long to live. Taken as one, The Blackridge House is a meditation on belonging, on the stories we tell of home and family, on the precarious footprint of life.

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9781868429646

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Reviews

‘The Blackridge House is a quiet masterpiece - a page-turning story told with deep empathy and insight, in limpid prose.’ – Mark Gevisser. ‘What a finely crafted text! The narrative keeps sharpening its lenses until one experiences what is hardest to grasp: everything is irrevocably interwoven – but miraculously so.’ – Antjie Krog

'The Blackridge House is a quiet masterpiece - a page-turning story told with deep empathy and insight, in limpid prose.' - Mark Gevisser. 'What a finely crafted text! The narrative keeps sharpening its lenses until one experiences what is hardest to grasp: everything is irrevocably interwoven - but miraculously so.' - Antjie Krog

Author Information

JULIA MARTIN is a professor in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. Her travel memoir, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (Kwela Books, 2008) was long-listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. Her most recent book, Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (Trinity University Press, 2014) was co-authored with the eminent North American poet and essayist, Gary Snyder and is a collection of 30 years of their correspondence and interviews.

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