Red Dust Road

‘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”. 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, she 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. ‘A clear-eyed, witty and unsentimental account of the push and pull between nature and nurture. Happiness shines through’ – “Sunday Times”. ‘Wonderful, humane …This is a book with resolution, determination and honesty’ – “Scotland on Sunday”. ‘It is Kay’s abundant wit that makes Red Dust Road such a moving, spirited work. This is a terrifically easy, evocative, and often amusing read …A remarkable, soul-searching journey’ – “Sunday Herald”.

Reviews of Red Dust Road

Starred Review. Kay s complex life story is fascinating on all fronts cultural, emotional, and artistic. But it is her sparkling warmth, generous candor, depthless compassion, glinting humor, and linguistic pizazz that make this such a stellar chronicle of a deeply personal investigative and imaginative journey, a profoundly affecting inquiry into the enigmas of self and kinship, and a celebration of transcendent goodness.