Description

Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she gets the result of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, desperately seeking answers from her ailing mother whose memories and English are failing. Maclear no longer speaks Japanese, her mother’s first language, so she turns to her mother’s second fluent tongue: the wild and green language of soil, seed, leaf and mulch.

Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? What gets planted and what gets buried? Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes far beyond heredity, full of unflinching insights into grief, loyalty and the relationship between mothers and daughters.

Publisher Review

‘Magnificent…I will never forget it’ – Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

‘A mind-altering and supremely generous exploration of kinship, selfhood, memory, and the roots we share across time, space and species’ – Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything

‘In this beautiful book Kyo Maclear unravels the knotty stories we inherit – and create – about who we are and where we come from. With deftness and clarity she ranges from meditations on memory, belonging and truth, to the earthy tangibility of the garden. Fierce, loving, inquisitive, devastating – this book got under my nails and into my heart. I loved it’ – Lulah Ellender, author of Grounding

‘Unearthing is a masterful lyric exploration of identity, inheritance and belonging in the wake of an unsettling discovery, that deftly queries what makes us who we are, and what happens when the stability of our foundations is challenged. It investigates nature, nurture and genetic legacies, who our parents are before and beyond us, and who we become because or despite them. Both seasonal, contemporary and spiralling through botanic and genetic time, the writing is absorbing and transformative; the story will grow through you’ – Polly Atkin, author of Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better

‘A lucid and compelling memoir of family rupture and repair and the power of plants to anchor us in the world’ – Sue Stuart-Smith, author of the Sunday Times Bestseller The Well Gardened Mind