The Blackridge House: A Memoir

By Julia Martin

A quest is never what you expect it to be.

Elizabeth Madeline Martin spends her days in a retirement home in Cape Town, watching the pigeons and squirrels on the branch of a tree outside her window. Bedridden, her memory fading, she can recall her early childhood spent in a small wood-and-iron house in Blackridge on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Though she remembers the place in detail – dogs, a mango tree, a stream – she has no idea of where exactly it is. ‘My memory is full of blotches,’ she tells her daughter Julia, ‘like ink left about and knocked over.’

Julia resolves to find the Blackridge house: with her mother lonely and confused, would this, perhaps, bring some measure of closure? A journey begins that traverses family history, forgotten documents, old photographs, and the maps that stake out a country’s troubled past – maps whose boundaries nature remains determined to resist. Kind strangers, willing to assist in the search, lead to unexpected discoveries of ancestors and wars and lullabies. Folded into this quest are the tender conversations between a daughter and a mother who does not have long to live. Taken as one, The Blackridge House is a meditation on belonging, of the stories we tell of home and family, of the precarious footprint of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: Mar 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781868429653

Julia Martin

Julia Martin is a South African writer and a professor of English at the University of the Western Cape. In addition to academic work in ecocriticism, she writes creative nonfiction with a particular interest in metaphors of interconnectedness and the representation of place. She is the author of Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects with Barry Lopez, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites and The Blackridge House: A Memoir, and she collaborated with Gary Snyder on Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, a collection of three decades of their letters and interviews. She and her family live in Cape Town, South Africa.