Overview
When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it. A few years later, she and her brother finally did.
Nick, an absent father, was a would-be writer and back-to-the-lander who lived off the grid in Northern California. Nick’s own father, Gawen—also absent—had been a wellborn Englishman who wrote a Bloomsbury-like novel about lesbian lovers, before moving to Kenya and ultimately dying a mysterious death at age twenty-seven. Brownrigg was told Gawen had likely died by suicide.
Reconstructing Gawen’s short, colorful life from revelations in the package takes her through glamorous 1930s London and staid Pasadena, toward the last gasp of the British Empire in Kenya, and from there, deep into the California redwoods, where Nick later carved out a rugged path in the wilderness, keeping his English past at bay. Vividly weaving together the lives of her father and grandfather, through memory and imagination, Brownrigg explores issues of sexuality and silences, and childhoods fractured by divorce. In her uncovering of this lost family, she writes movingly of daughterhood and of parenthood, gradually making her own story whole.
This book title, The Whole Staggering Mystery (A Story of Fathers Lost and Found), ISBN: 9781640096974, by Sylvia Brownrigg, published by Catapult (April 22, 2025) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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