Red Dust Road

Jackie Kay's compassionate, life-affirming and extraordinarily moving memoir

‘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