A ‘Reading for Wellbeing’ recommended read!
Red dust road by Jackie Kay
Red Dust Road is autobiographical; Jackie Kay takes you as the reader by the hand and leads you on a journey from a wee cottage in the Highlands of Scotland to the red dust roads of Nigeria. On this journey Kay seeks out her birth parents in an attempt to explore the source of the ‘windy place’ in her heart, which is the result of being ‘the bundle of child that is wrapped up in the ghostly shawl of adoption’.
If you’ve ever had the good fortune to see or hear Jackie Kay read her work, then you will know the mischief and the smile in her voice, which comes singing through her writing. If you’ve never encountered Kay before, then this book is the perfect introduction to a writer with a wonderfully wicked sense of humour and a very big heart. What I’ve always found so appealing about Jackie Kay’s work is the way she clearly relishes the eccentricities and complexities of the human condition. She tells tales of the everyday and gives voice to people you can actually imagine meeting in your daily life. But in bringing these people to life on the page and narrating everyday experiences, she suffuses the apparently ordinary with the truly magical.
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