“Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration” by Davina Quinlivan has been co-published as an audio book with the new audio platform Spiracle Audio.
Shalimar is a memoir, but a particularly rich, lyrical and textured one. It weaves together Davina Quinlivan’s own story – her childhood in west London as the only child of parents with a rich and multi-layered heritage; her marriage and motherhood; her development as a writer – with a kind of meditation on the legacies of empire, on the experience and meaning of the English countryside, on our relationship with the natural world.
What Shalimar circles back to, again and again, is the death of Quinlivan’s father and her experience of a grief which troubles normal understandings of time. But this layering, circling, non-linear time of grief is also the time of writing. It is writing that allows Quinlivan to recreate the lives of her grandparents and her great-grandparents, to write her father into her future as he had been there in her past; it allows her to create something from her grief by drawing on exactly its time-confusing effects
Davina said: “It tells the story of my family history through nature writing and poetic prose. My great grandfather was born in Clare and then travelled to the Bay of Bengal in the late 19th century (1887), his son marrying a Burmese woman and then these two generations lived in Asia before my father arrived in England in 1955. In Shalimar, I tell the story of my grandmothers’ climbing of the Blarney Stone, amongst other family.”
