The whole staggering mystery : a story of fathers lost and found / Sylvia Brownrigg.
2024
Non-Fiction
Available at Popular Reading
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Details
Author
Brownrigg, Sylvia, author.
Title
The whole staggering mystery : a story of fathers lost and found / Sylvia Brownrigg.
Edition
First Counterpoint edition.
Imprint
California : Counterpoint, 2024.
Description
323 pages : illustrations, genealogical table ; 24 cm
Formatted Contents Note
A tale of two fathers. The intrepid Brownrigg party
Wine o'clock somewhere
Los muertos
The Welsh word for "little bird"
All souls
Deep throat
A person in a photograph
"I had a farm in Africa"
The problems of abnormality
The old adobe
With luck, you come out the other side... or you don't
Obliquely panting prose
Now what?
When you are old enough to wish to know something about your Father
Gentleman farmer
A death in Nairobi. Where reasons end
Condolences
The Kipling touch
Wild and woolly people
End of empire
A life in Ukiah. Something complete and great
Groovy kids
The anxiety comes
The whole staggering mystery. A nanosecond on this earth
Something to marvel at
Hitchhiker's guide
Faltering minds
What's yours?
What's ahead
The death story.
Wine o'clock somewhere
Los muertos
The Welsh word for "little bird"
All souls
Deep throat
A person in a photograph
"I had a farm in Africa"
The problems of abnormality
The old adobe
With luck, you come out the other side... or you don't
Obliquely panting prose
Now what?
When you are old enough to wish to know something about your Father
Gentleman farmer
A death in Nairobi. Where reasons end
Condolences
The Kipling touch
Wild and woolly people
End of empire
A life in Ukiah. Something complete and great
Groovy kids
The anxiety comes
The whole staggering mystery. A nanosecond on this earth
Something to marvel at
Hitchhiker's guide
Faltering minds
What's yours?
What's ahead
The death story.
Summary
"When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it, so she and her brother finally did. Nick, an absent father, was a hippie and would-be Beat writer who lived off the grid in Northern California. Nick's own father, Gawen-also absent-had been a well-born Englishman who wrote a Bloomsbury-like novel about lesbian lovers, before moving to Kenya and ultimately dying a mysterious death at age twenty-seven. Brownrigg was told he had likely died by suicide. Reconstructing Gawen's short, colorful life from revelations in the package takes her through glamorous 1930s London and Pasadena, toward the last gasp of the British Empire in Kenya, and from there, deep into the California redwoods, where Nick later carved out a rugged path in the wilderness, keeping his English past at bay. Vividly weaving together the lives of her father and grandfather, through memory and imagination, Brownrigg explores issues of sexuality and silences, and childhoods fractured by divorce. In her uncovering of this lost family, she finally makes her own story whole"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references.
Call Number
Non-Fiction
Language
English
ISBN
9781640096561 (hardcover)
1640096566 (hardcover)
9781640096578 (ebook)
1640096566 (hardcover)
9781640096578 (ebook)
Record Appears in
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New Acquisitions > Popular reading
Monographs & Serials
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