Livingstone’s Funeral by Landeg White

Welsh poet and African scholar launches stunning novel

Matriarchy and the threads that unite disparate women across centuries and cultures weave through this powerful, innovative novel to make this one of the most gripping stories of the year. Landeg White brings a lifetime of scholarship and lyricism to bear on this epic, but intensely personal story of a young woman’s search for identity and the realisation that ancestry is not always as it seems and the blood that links us can flow between continents.

Maria, a student in Brighton, begins to piece together her family history during a dull Christmas visit to her grandmother and after buying an African carving that she someone can’t resist. Discovering that Caroline, the long suffering colonial wife who’s letters are still safely kept was not her great-grandmother at all, Maria begins of journey of discovery that pieces together the disparate narratives that weave through this rich and intelligent novel; a journey that draws together ‘people who cared not for nation or tribe but for the infinitely varied networks that were our common inheritance.‘

Landeg White brings a lifetime of scholarship and lyricism to bear on this epic, but intensely personal story of a young woman’s search for identity and the realisation that ancestry is not always as it seems. Maria, a student in Brighton, begins to piece together her family history during a dull Christmas visit to her grandmother after buying an African carving that she can’t resist. Discovering that Caroline, the long suffering colonial wife whose letters are still safely kept was not her great-grandmother at all, Maria begins of journey of discovery that pieces together the disparate narratives of this rich and intelligent novel; a journey that draws together ‘people who cared not for nation or tribe but for the infinitely varied networks that were our common inheritance.

Praise for Livingstones Funeral

The novel is a rich, informative, sometimes alarming and often moving account …generous and perceptive …post-post-colonial in the ironies and sympathies it has available for almost all its characters. …a novel of confidence and subtlety

Stephen Knight

Original, subtle, inventive … Livingstone’s Funeral has huge potential to become the best seller in its genre.

Jack Mapanje

Landeg White was born in South Wales in 1940. He taught at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad, where he was chief arranger for a steel band; in the University of Malawi, from where he was deported in 1972; in the University of Sierra Leone, where he wrote the detective novel Inspector Tucker & the Leopard Men, and in the University of Zambia, where he was teaching when his first book V.S. Naipaul: a Critical Introduction, appeared. The second third was played out at the University of York where he joined the Centre for Southern African Studies in 1980, becoming Director in 1984. Here he wrote two Mozambican histories, the history of a village in Malawi, a study of southern Africa praise poetry, an anthology of African oral poetry (co-authored with Jack Mapanje) and three collections of his own poetry.Since 1994, he has lived in Portugal where he teaches at the Universidade Aberta (Open University). Here, he has published a prize-winning translation of Camões’ The Lusiads, and four further collections of poetry, including Where the Angolans are Playing Football: Selected and New Poems and Arab Work. The Collected Lyrics of Luis de Camoes was published by Princeton University Press in August (2008).