Overview

The New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Room brings a slice of his own family history to life through extensive research and rich storytelling. Beginning with his great-great-grandfather Abraham Block, acclaimed novelist Simon Mawer sifts through evidence like an archaeologist, piecing together the stories of his ancestors. Illiterate and lacking opportunity in the bleak Suffolk village where his parents worked as agricultural laborers, Abraham leaves home at fifteen, in 1847. He signs away the next five years in an indenture aboard a ship, which will circuitously lead him to London and well beyond, to far-flung ports on the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In London he crosses paths with Naomi Lulham, a young seamstress likewise seeking a better life in the city, with all its prospects and temptations.     Another branch of the family tree comes together in 1847, in Manchester, as soldier George Mawer weds his Irish bride Ann Scanlon—Annie—before embarking with his regiment. When he is called to fight in the Crimean War, Annie must fend for herself and her children on a meager income, navigating an often hostile world as a woman alone.     With a keen eye and a nuanced consideration of the limits of what we can know about the past, Mawer paints a compelling, intimate portrait of life in the nineteenth century.

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9781635423198

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An astonishing blend of historical fiction and imaginative nonfiction, Ancestry is a book that will stay with me forever. Mawer's recounting of his nineteenth-century ancestors' lives is girded by the most basic facts of life and infused with admiration and love on every page. 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, international bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls Praise for The Glass Room: A war-torn adventure story that's eerily erotic and tremendously exciting...[a] gorgeous novel. -Washington Post [A] stirring historical novel. -The New Yorker A thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry...a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterized by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling. -The Guardian

Praise for The Glass Room: A war-torn adventure story that's eerily erotic and tremendously exciting...[a] gorgeous novel. -Washington Post [A] stirring historical novel. -The New Yorker A thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry...a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterized by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling. -The Guardian

Author Information

Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England. His first novel, Chimera, won the McKitterick Prize for first novels. Mendel’s Dwarf, his first book to be published in the United States, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a New York Times Book to Remember. He is the author of the Booker short-listed The Glass Room (Other Press, 2009), Trapeze (Other Press, 2012), Tightrope (Other Press, 2015), and Prague Spring (Other Press, 2018).  

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