The Blackridge House (Audiobook)

The Blackridge House by Julia Martin is a daughter’s exquisitely written and moving portrait of her mother’s dementia, and her quest to discover the past. The Blackridge House is a meditation on belonging, of the stories we tell of home and family, of the precarious footprint of life.

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‘What a finely crafted text! The narrative keeps sharpening its
lenses until one experiences what is hardest to grasp: everything is
irrevocably interwoven – but miraculously so.’ – Antjie Krog

A quest is never what you expect it to be.

Elizabeth Madeline Martin spends her days in a retirement home in Cape Town, watching the pigeons and squirrels on the branch of a tree outside her window. Bedridden, her memory fading, she can recall her early childhood spent in a small wood-and-iron house in Blackridge on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Though she remembers the place in detail – dogs, a mango tree, a stream – she has no idea of where exactly it is. ‘My memory is full of blotches,’ she tells her daughter Julia, ‘like ink left about and knocked over.’

Julia resolves to find the Blackridge house: with her mother lonely and confused, would this, perhaps, bring some measure of closure? A journey begins that traverses family history, forgotten documents, old photographs, and the maps that stake out a country’s troubled past – maps whose boundaries nature remains determined to resist. Kind strangers, willing to assist in the search, lead to unexpected discoveries of ancestors and wars and lullabies. Folded into this quest are the tender conversations between a daughter and a mother who does not have long to live. Taken as one, The Blackridge House is a meditation on belonging, of the stories we tell of home and family, of the precarious footprint of life.

Publication Date

January 2024

Narrator

Megan Choritz

Extent

7 hours 26 minutes

ISBN

9781776194063

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