Manyebook

The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir

"This is the story I have been writing for my whole life. With my life, " writes Valerie Miner in this elegant and compassionate account of her family's migration from Edinburgh's tenements across the world. The Low Road explores location and dislocation in a large, poverty-striken Scottish family. Focusing on the life journeys of her grandmother, her mother, and herself, Miner searches for truth about family members, unveiling family secrets and missing histories. This powerful and moving memoir is a dramatic passage through poverty, immigration, and national and sexual identity.

“The Low Road is as entertaining as it is insightful. Valerie

Miner is an obviously brilliant author writing about the story she has carried with her for a lifetime. And it’s a good story.”

The Bloomsbury Review

“Truly, the story belongs to Miner’s mother, Mary, the repressed

link between the lost homeland and the new world. Miner fills in this history with aching detail. Mary changed her name to Pat, married and had children. She worked in a coffee shop. At 50, her husband left her. At 77, she retired,eventually succumbing to Alzheimer’. Standing in her mother’s empty home, Miner remembers her last days, divorced, alone and living in a

studio apartment. ‘All this after eighty years? It could have been worse,is my mother’s reply.’ Coming at the end of the book, it’s a lovingly rendered chapter, typical of the rich family portrait Miner has created.”

Washington Post

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 259
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780870136405
  • Genres
  • memoir, scotland
  • Release date
  • 2002