Genre Fiction
![Simon Mawer - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APV2DO.jpg)
Ancestry: A Novel
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.
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.
Editorial Reviews
"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
"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
Readers Top Reviews
L. LowesSimon EF Raw
I have read all of Simon Mawer's novels and I was so excited when this new one landed on my doorstep. What a huge disappointment. I have found it completely uninteresting. The footnotes and the photographic excerpts from various official records are a drag and the whole exercise I can only put down to Mawer overindulging in his personal ancestry search and thinking he can make some money out of the time he has spent on his hobby. How such an esteemed author can have produced this following 'Mendel's Dwarf' and 'Prague Spring' to name just two of his best is beyond me. I have even read his very early works and his autobiographical account of living in Italy which were dull but still better than 'Ancestry'. I would like to say sorry to Simon Mawer but come on - you can do better than this.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Preface
What is the past? I don't mean personal memory – I mean the distant past beyond living experience. History is the way the past is told, an altogether different thing. But what is this past? In what does it consist? In one sense, of course, we carry our past within us, in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies – that acronymic DNA that we have been bequeathed and that, in turn, we cut and shuffle and deal out to our children like so many packs of cards. But there are other things besides. There may be family stories, memories that are handed down, soon to become distorted out of all proportion or simply fade and be forgotten. Then there are the artefacts, the scratchings of pens on fading documents – census entries, birth certificates, perhaps even a diary or a collection of letters. Other than those traces, is the past anything more than quaint old build- ings that we treasure far beyond their material worth and the objects that sit in museums – this pewter bowl, that rusted cutlass, these gems, those pieces of pottery – to be glanced at indifferently by schoolchildren on field trips? But a past that only consists of the artefacts is like a skeleton unearthed in an archaeological dig. Where is the flesh and blood? Who were the people? What did they feel? Where have they gone?
Part 1
Suffolk, 1837
The beach was an escape. A long, empty strand, a smear of sand and shingle beaten by waves and stretching away into the haze of distance. Nothing much but marram grass grew there in the shifting surface, along with sea kale and sand couch and a creeping bindweed with pale pink trumpet flowers. But out to sea? A glimpse of sails, tan sails bending towards the south. People going miles and miles. To where? To the ends of the earth, wherever they were.
The two boys walked along the shingle for a while, hoping to find something, anything, that they might have. Sometimes you discovered things washed up. Bits from ships. Wood and stuff. Useful, maybe. When there was a wreck, then all the people from the village would be out looking. Kids wouldn't get a chance. Like the previous year, after that great storm when there were twenty ships cast up and wrecked. But on a day like this, with the sun in the sky and a fine, cool breeze from off the water . . .
"Over there!"
It was something, sure enough. Below the shingle, on the flesh-coloured sand, a mass of grey just where the waves broke. Not a rock. There were no rocks round here. Maybe a dead seal. You saw seals often, their heads bobbing in the water, like people swimming almost. Or maybe it was an old coat. A coat'd be useful once the salt had been washed out of it.
They ran, stumbling, down onto the sand, and stopped.
A head. Seaweed for hair. White skin and a barnacle beard. A single, glaucous eye glaring up at the sky. One foot was buried in the sand, the other moved with the breaking of the waves, as though the man was beating time to some tune that only he could hear.
"He's dead," Isaac whispered.
"What'll we do?" his brother Abraham asked. "Go and tell someone, do we'll get into trouble."
They didn't move. The eye stared. There was sand in the earhole. A hand lay like a dead fish beside the face. Mauve lips. Blue nails.
Abraham put out a foot and pushed. "What you doin'?"
"Just seein'."
"That's insulting the dead."
"I'm not insulting him. I don't know him. He's just dead." He crouched down and pushed his hand in among the folds of sodden cloth.
"Hey! What you doin' now?" "Just seein'."
The cloth clung to his fingers as he felt around inside. It was like groping in the guts of some dead animal, a rabbit, maybe. Except they were warm whereas this was cold: the chill of the grave. Then his fingers found something tough, some different thing among the cold cling. He pulled his hand out to see. It was a leather purse, like a mermaid's purse, one of those egg cases they sometimes found along the beach. The curate, who called himself a student of God's natural wonders, had told them they were the egg cases of sharks. But inside this purse, no embryo dogfish. Instead, when Abraham pulled it open, there were two gold coins, gleaming in the sudden sunlight.
The boys breathed deeply. A woman's head on one side; on the other, a shield. "That's the Queen," said Isaac, trying to take one.
Abraham snatched it back. "Them's mine." "Them's not yours, them's 'is."
"Them's gold and them's mine." He took one of them and put it to his mouth to bite it, not because...
What is the past? I don't mean personal memory – I mean the distant past beyond living experience. History is the way the past is told, an altogether different thing. But what is this past? In what does it consist? In one sense, of course, we carry our past within us, in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies – that acronymic DNA that we have been bequeathed and that, in turn, we cut and shuffle and deal out to our children like so many packs of cards. But there are other things besides. There may be family stories, memories that are handed down, soon to become distorted out of all proportion or simply fade and be forgotten. Then there are the artefacts, the scratchings of pens on fading documents – census entries, birth certificates, perhaps even a diary or a collection of letters. Other than those traces, is the past anything more than quaint old build- ings that we treasure far beyond their material worth and the objects that sit in museums – this pewter bowl, that rusted cutlass, these gems, those pieces of pottery – to be glanced at indifferently by schoolchildren on field trips? But a past that only consists of the artefacts is like a skeleton unearthed in an archaeological dig. Where is the flesh and blood? Who were the people? What did they feel? Where have they gone?
Part 1
Suffolk, 1837
The beach was an escape. A long, empty strand, a smear of sand and shingle beaten by waves and stretching away into the haze of distance. Nothing much but marram grass grew there in the shifting surface, along with sea kale and sand couch and a creeping bindweed with pale pink trumpet flowers. But out to sea? A glimpse of sails, tan sails bending towards the south. People going miles and miles. To where? To the ends of the earth, wherever they were.
The two boys walked along the shingle for a while, hoping to find something, anything, that they might have. Sometimes you discovered things washed up. Bits from ships. Wood and stuff. Useful, maybe. When there was a wreck, then all the people from the village would be out looking. Kids wouldn't get a chance. Like the previous year, after that great storm when there were twenty ships cast up and wrecked. But on a day like this, with the sun in the sky and a fine, cool breeze from off the water . . .
"Over there!"
It was something, sure enough. Below the shingle, on the flesh-coloured sand, a mass of grey just where the waves broke. Not a rock. There were no rocks round here. Maybe a dead seal. You saw seals often, their heads bobbing in the water, like people swimming almost. Or maybe it was an old coat. A coat'd be useful once the salt had been washed out of it.
They ran, stumbling, down onto the sand, and stopped.
A head. Seaweed for hair. White skin and a barnacle beard. A single, glaucous eye glaring up at the sky. One foot was buried in the sand, the other moved with the breaking of the waves, as though the man was beating time to some tune that only he could hear.
"He's dead," Isaac whispered.
"What'll we do?" his brother Abraham asked. "Go and tell someone, do we'll get into trouble."
They didn't move. The eye stared. There was sand in the earhole. A hand lay like a dead fish beside the face. Mauve lips. Blue nails.
Abraham put out a foot and pushed. "What you doin'?"
"Just seein'."
"That's insulting the dead."
"I'm not insulting him. I don't know him. He's just dead." He crouched down and pushed his hand in among the folds of sodden cloth.
"Hey! What you doin' now?" "Just seein'."
The cloth clung to his fingers as he felt around inside. It was like groping in the guts of some dead animal, a rabbit, maybe. Except they were warm whereas this was cold: the chill of the grave. Then his fingers found something tough, some different thing among the cold cling. He pulled his hand out to see. It was a leather purse, like a mermaid's purse, one of those egg cases they sometimes found along the beach. The curate, who called himself a student of God's natural wonders, had told them they were the egg cases of sharks. But inside this purse, no embryo dogfish. Instead, when Abraham pulled it open, there were two gold coins, gleaming in the sudden sunlight.
The boys breathed deeply. A woman's head on one side; on the other, a shield. "That's the Queen," said Isaac, trying to take one.
Abraham snatched it back. "Them's mine." "Them's not yours, them's 'is."
"Them's gold and them's mine." He took one of them and put it to his mouth to bite it, not because...
