Home fires burning

A fictionalised account of an author’s ancestors, pairing domestic struggle and military derring-do, leads the latest top popular fiction.

-  GILL SOUTH

ANCESTRY, by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown, $37.99) In Ancestry, Simon Mawer has done what some of us might be able to do if we seriously turned our minds to it. Using a 1928 photo of some of his relatives, he travels back in time to imagine how their lives became intertwined. Though because he’s a Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist – for 2009’s The Glass Room – he does it rather better than most. He begins in 1837, by fleshing out the life of six-year-old Abraham Block as he grows up in a poor Suffolk family, scavenging for trinkets from shipwrecks on the Strand with his brother. Given the chance to become an apprentice sailor, Abraham grabs it, cheered on by his Uncle Isaac, who has made good in London.

Hastings-born seamstress Naomi Lulham, an attractive young woman who comes to London at 17 for work, has a love affair with Abraham, which leaves her reliant on the kindness of the fledgling sailor’s family. Then there’s Private George Mawer, who is in the early stages of a military career and about to depart for Crimea. Before leaving, he marries Ann Scanlon in Manchester Cathedral.

Abraham and George are key players in this story, but it’s the women in their lives that Mawer gives the spotlight to, aware that if it wasn’t for their grit and resilience the author wouldn’t be here to spin this tale.

For both Naomi and Ann – mothers, workers, financial providers – the workhouse is always only a step away when their husbands are at sea or war. If the women failed to find work, their fate often lay in the hands of a begrudging and at times abusive church community.