'Once you unravel these stories you will not be able to forget them.'
Peter Tye is a world-weary professional investigator of family history - he has spent a lifetime as a genealogist carefully unearthing secrets and scandals, bringing the past into he present, making order out of the muddled disorder of other people's lives. But when a chance discovery in the archive leads Peter to a story from his own family tree, he finds his otherwise ordered life takes a new turn.
A smudged 19th Century newspaper cutting introduces him to a young woman with a baby, begging in the winter snow of an Ipswich churchyard.
As Peter researches further he will follow the trail of an extraordinary family to Australia and India and all he way back to East Anglia again. One way or another, these new and often raucous voices from his family tree will bring Peter to a place where he must cross not only time and space and history, but the undisturbed continents of his own heart.
Note from the author:
The character of Peter Tye is fiction (though I imagine him to be my cousin on my mother's side). All the people he discovers in the archive once lived, and this novel is an attempt to give them the voices they never had or, at least, never had recorded. Despite their poverty, lack of education, or influence, they survived, they had ambitions, made decisions, and had emotional lives. They left intangible inheritances for their many ancestors across the globe.