Who Was Angela Zendalic? is set in Oxford, in the locality of Jericho and the world of University academia, encompassing the past and the present. A deeply moving and sensitive story told with skill, humour, and a mirror to profoundly changing times.
In 1954, Peggy, a respectable war widow and librarian, gives birth out of wedlock to Angela, a ‘coloured’ baby, and due to the discrimination of society, and her own deep shame, must give up the baby for adoption. Angela is adopted by a loving and well-meaning white couple, and as she grows up must come to terms with racial prejudice, the confusion surrounding her circumstances, and of falling in love with a man fifteen years her senior. Sarah, Angela’s own daughter, grows up to be a feisty, liberated single parent who, on the death of her father, discovers her mother was a stranger called Angela Zendalic. Thus, she must confront her shock in order to search for her.