The whole staggering mystery A story of fathers lost and found

Novelist Brownrigg's (Pages for Her, 2017) memoir explores her relationship with her mostly absent father and his family. After her parents' acrimonious divorce, the author's father moved to a cabin in Northern California, a quintessential back-to-the-lander, with one large difference: he, Sir Nicholas Gawen Brownrigg, was also a British peer. Nicholas grew up in the U.S. with his mother after his own parents divorced when he was a toddler. He never knew his father, who died under mysterious circumstances in Kenya. As an adult, the author began to mend her relationship with her father. A surprising find--the previously unknown family history written by Nicholas' paternal grandmother during WWII--revealed an alternative history of Nicholas' parents' marriage and shed a more loving light on the author's British ancestors. Brownrigg delves into the facts and fictions that shaped her family for generations, weaving the newly discovered revelations with the copious correspondence her father kept up during his lifetime and her own evolving understanding of her father. The result will especially resonate with those whose own family histories contain secrets.

A lyrical memoir/reimagining of a family scattered among colonial Kenya, wartime England, and the California redwoods over the past century. One day in 2012, novelist Brownrigg received a box in the mail containing letters, sepia portraits, information about the birth of her father, Nick, and a typed account about the short life of her English grandfather, Gawen, who was also a novelist. This treasure trove helped Brownrigg to not only uncover the mystery of these two men--Gawen died in his late 20s, and Nick left the family when Brownrigg was a baby ("his early absence left a constant hollowness in me")--but also learn her family history and her place in it. Told in four parts, the engrossing text moves back and forth in time, from the English countryside in the early 1930s to the redwoods of Northern California in the 1970s, back to Kenya in the fading days of the British Empire, forward to London during World War II, and finally to the present in California. Though this is a memoir, Brownrigg executes an impressive reconstruction of history. In one chapter, we experience the viewpoint of Gawen's supervisor in Kenya; in another, we follow Nick's dead brother; yet another imagines the life of Beatrice, Brownrigg's great-grandmother, living alone in London during wartime, after the deaths of her son, Gawen, and her husband. Boldly, the author also writes about herself and her family as if they were characters in a novel. "Getting at Nick…required me to blur him into Frank, and myself to Sophie….The move simultaneously provided distance and proximity: I could see my child self at arm's length but the parent from closer to, like a perspective-altering telescope." Brownrigg's skillful interweaving of slippery narrative threads adds up to an immersive reading experience. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.