The Blackridge House : A Memoir

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.

• | Author: Julia Martin
• | Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
• | Publication Date: Mar 14, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 264 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1868429644
• | ISBN-13: 9781868429646