How do the ghosts and myths of our family’s past travel into the present? How do these fragments take root, shaping who we are and how we navigate our way in the world?
In her mid-twenties, after the death of her father, Davina Quinlivan leaves her family home in Hayes, west London, to begin a transitory life. She feels restless, never quite at home in the countryside, stuck between ‘Deep England’ and the technicolour memories and mythology of her family’s migration story.
Beginning in colonial India and Burma, where the women in her family descend from the indigenous tribes and diasporas of Portuguese Kerala and the Shan Hills of Myanmar, the extraordinary history of Quinlivan’s Anglo-Asian family reaches England in the 1950s, where the mountains and gardens of Mogok and Darjeeling blend with the streets of Southall and Ealing. Yet the stories of her ancestors endure, smuggled through time and place in the sweet flavours of her auntie’s cooking, in the tales her father tells before he dies.
Quinlivan is the inheritor, and in Shalimar she has conjured a new place, between continents, between worlds. This lyrical story of migration, of returning home and making a home, is an assured debut by an exceptional new voice.
Shalimar by Davina Quinlivan (Hardback)
Davina Quinlivan is a lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. For several years she has run ‘F: For Flanerie’ , a series of writing and film seminars at The Freud Museum, and alongside Marina Warner and Robert Macfarlane is part of the founding teaching ensemble at The New School of the Anthropocene. Her writing has appeared widely; she is now working on a follow-up to Shalimar entitled Waterlines, and a novel set between Cornwall and the Black Sea.