Shalimar
Davina Quinlivan’s work maps, with grace and rigour, the rich, strange ground that lies between memoir, cultural history and nature writing – Robert Macfarlane
Shalimar is a memoir, but a particularly textured one. It weaves together Davina Quinlivan’s own story – her childhood in west London as the only child of parents with a rich and multi-layered heritage; her marriage and motherhood; her development as a writer – with a kind of meditation on the legacies of empire, on the experience and meaning of the English countryside, on our relationship with the natural world. What Shalimar circles back to, again and again, is the death of Quinlivan’s father and her experience of a grief which troubles normal understandings of time. But this layering, circling, non-linear time of grief is also the time of writing. It is writing that allows Quinlivan to recreate the lives of her grandparents and her great-grandparents, to write her father into her future as he had been there in her past; it allows her to create something from her grief by drawing on exactly its time-confusing effects.
Published with Little Toller Books
Cover: Meriel Brown