How could it not? This is in Britain in the 1970s and 80s. She has gone on to marry a black man and Kay discovers, to her astonishment, that she has sisters with the same colour skin as her own.Īnd though this is not a book about race, it runs like a refrain through the narrative. Kay's birth mother, a fragile and wounded creature, battles with mental-health problems, and has become a Mormon. 'There are essentially two kinds of adopted people: the ones who never trace, who never want to, are not interested, or who are frightened of hurting their adoptive parents' feelings and the ones who want to trace, who are curious about their origins, who think that in tracing their original parents they will understand themselves better.' Kay wishes briefly she were one of the former, but no writer so good could be so incurious.īeing pregnant with her own son in 1988 provides Kay with the initial spur to trace her roots, and the people she meets are very different from her mother's imaginings. These moments are offered as shared reminiscences, and are interspersed with other memories taken from different times, mainly of Kay tracing and eventually meeting the real people behind her mother's fairytales.

Her mother tells her the little she knows about Jackie's birth parents and imagines what she does not know: they were madly in love, but he was already betrothed to another, they were heartbroken to give her away. From Abuja, Kay returns us to a 1960s Glaswegian childhood with her parents John and Helen, delightful people, communists who spend their summer holidays singing in the car, who cross Russia by train, and raise her surrounded by caring comrades.

Red dust road author