Shortlisted for the Galaxy Biography of the Year Award 2011.
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 17 March 2011.
This charmingly written autobiography - about a young girl with a Nigerian father adopted by a wonderfully humane white Scottish couple - could have been a dark, complicated to read. But it isn't. There is clarity, warmth and a twinkle in the eye. A sense of someone who is comfortable in her own skin as she comes to terms with the meaning of love and her own sexuality. Thoughtful, tender, gentle and humane, Red Dust Road is a delight to read.
I find Jackie Kay's writing compelling and so evocative. I was gripped by this memoir of her journey to find out where she came from and to forge a connection with her birth parents.
You think adoption is a story which has an end. But the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending.
From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay's journey in Red Dust Road is one of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In a book remarkable for its warmth and candour, Kay discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that what triumphs, ultimately, is love.
Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny.
'Like the best memoirs, this one is written with novelistic and poetic flair. Red Dust Road is a fantastic, probing and heart-warming read' - Independent
Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
