She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me - Softcover

Brockes, Emma

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571275842 ISBN 13: 9780571275847

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2013

Synopsis

When Emma Brockes was ten years old, her mother said 'One day I will tell you the story of my life and you will be amazed.' Growing up in a tranquil English village, Emma knew very little of her mother's life before her. She knew Paula had grown up in South Africa and had seven siblings. She had been told stories about deadly snakes and hailstones the size of golf balls. There was mention, once, of a trial. But most of the past was a mystery. When her mother dies of cancer, Emma - by then a successful journalist at the Guardian - is free to investigate the untold story. Her search begins in the Colindale library but then takes her to South Africa, to the extended family she has never met and their accounts of a childhood so different to her own. She encounters versions of the life her mother chose to leave behind - and realises what a gift her mother gave her. Part investigation, part travelogue, part elegy, "She Left Me the Gun" is a gripping, funny and clear-eyed account of a writer's search for her mother's story.

About this title

Review:

A beautiful, wise book. It deals with the some of the grimmest aspects of human experience, but it is also one of the most genuinely up-lifting works I have read in years. Emma Brockes' superb, clear-eyed narration is an object lesson for any aspiring memoir-writer. She Left Me the Gun deserves to become a classic. -- Zoe Heller This astonishing, unsettling book examines the relationship between knowledge and love. Vigorously unsentimental, deeply absorbing, and written with fierce wit, It is an unstinting look at what it means to be innocent, at any stage of life, and how obsessively we all seek and avoid the many faces of truth. -- Andrew Solomon Emma Brockes sets out on a delicate journey to uncover a secret locked in the heart of her own family's darkness. A harrowing tale of murder and incest emerges, unfolding by stages in this utterly compelling psychological memoir. -- John Berendt She Left Me the Gun is quite simply an extraordinary book. In the hands of any halfway decent author, this would be an incredible story: a mother with a mysterious South African past who arrived in England in her early twenties with a beautiful antique handgun and a mission to forget who she used to be. In the hands of a writer as gifted as Emma Brockes, it's basically the perfect memoir: a riveting, authentic tale elegantly told. -- Viv Groskop Sunday Telegraph [A] courageous, clear-sighted book, which shifts between memoir and elegy as it examines the persistence of family secrets and the fragile interface between innocence and knowledge. -- Elizabeth Lowry The Guardian In the wry, jaunty tone of this miscreant memoir there is positive resolution of past secrets and recovery of present relationships. -- Iain Finlayson The Times [T]his soul-searching tale is a shocking trail of murder, violence, incest and betrayal that leaves her both shocked and proud ... Emma Brockes writes with dry humour and a refreshing lack of sentiment as she unravels the complex family ties that have become twisted into a difficult and at times almost impenetrable web of hidden suffering. -- Viv Watts Daily Express This book is her mother's story but it's also about Brockes, a seasoned journalist, pursuing that story, and the process is gripping. Driven by a palpable mixture of reluctance and determination, Brockes interviews family members about intimacies and terrors, uncovering rifts, secrets and in-jokes. -- Daneet Steffens Independent on Sunday The resulting memoir is an exemplary family history and immensely brave. It is one thing to delve into dusty archives in Pretoria, "each page containing the split-second possibility of an explosion in my face", but quite another to sit with aunts and uncles you've never met ("a wacky bunch") and ask them to recall a childhood lived in fear and that was exposed in court ... Brockes's descriptions of South Africa and her newly discovered family (towards whom she is loyal and generously affectionate) are astute and, one feels, tempered by the tightly coiled wayward nature of the freshly grief-stricken. It makes the slow pace of the revelations all the more honourable and heartfelt. The result is a wise, tender letter of love to a mother and her incredible sense of love and -necessary self-sufficiency. -- Helen Davies Sunday Times An amazing and harrowing story. In Emma Brockes's consummate, Joan Didionesque prose, it becomes a surpassingly rich meditation on family, endurance, secrecy, trauma, guilt, strength and love ... Intensely personal, but it is also a beautifully written and, ultimately, a redemptive book: deeply impressive, deeply painful, deeply true. -- Kevin Power Sunday Business Post This is a poignant, often funny, love letter to Brockes' mother. -- Lee Randall The Scotsman The late Nora Ephron suggested the title for Emma Brockes' She Left Me the Gun. Ephron ... was as smart as they come in Hollywood and you only need to read the opening chapters to understand why she took such a close interest in the career of this remarkable young writer and Guardian journalist ... It isn't just the story itself that sets this book apart. Brockes's prose is potent enough to do justice to the power of her insights. And although she is very good at maintaining the tension in the detective part of the story, she has an even more important ability to keep up the emotional suspense. Ephron, her mentor, would have approved. -- Christena Appleyard Literary Review A tender, real-life story of dark family secrets and a daughter's search for the truth. Marie Claire

Book Description:

She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockes is the astonishing, intensely moving and beautifully told true story of dark family secrets and one woman's search for the truth.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0571275842
• ISBN 13: 9780571275847
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304