Ancestry

Praise

“Utterly absorbing…so cleverly constructed and beautifully written.” —The Times (UK), The Best New Historical Fiction
 
“Moving and exhilarating.” —The Spectator
 
“Gripping…as Mawer writes, ‘emotions aren’t inscribed in the registry’ so he uses all his skill as a novelist to evoke them from hazy details…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 (UK)
 
“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 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