Walking Book Club - Shalimar with writer Davina Quinlivan

“In  the spear-shaped tips of the trees, they breech their silence. Their  faces peer out at me through English oaks and Burmese teak. Why did I  relinquish them? I was never a Russian doll: it was me they harboured.  They were still carrying me, pulling me deep into their mountainside of  truth. There was a whole world inside there. They carve out, from the  full moon in an English meadow, a silver spear for me. Now, the silver  spear has become a Tibetan horse. She is running towards tomorrow.”

Shalimar is a conjured place, but it is also an inheritance. A blend of nature-writing, magical realism and memoir, it is an incantation, but also a ship carrying a family safe inside, a sorrow-song and a fever dream.  This book tells the story of Quinlivan’s Anglo-Asian family whose extraordinary mythology haunts her own sense of time and place over the course of ten years and seven house moves through England, finally settling in rural Devon with a young family of her own. Quinlivan’s story takes on an Odyssean cadence as she meets her grandmother in the form of a teak tree in Ireland, trepasses through a replica of Virgil’s Tomb in a Lutyens garden in Surrey and comes face to face with the Green Man beneath ancient oaks in Hampshire. This book is sure to make its home in the heart of anyone who has ever moved, or migrated, however major or minor in scale.

‘Davina Quinlivan is a writer of rare gentleness and insight: in Shalimarshe winds us into the skein of her extended diasporic family, expressing the complexity of identity today. Deftly she weaves back and forth in time as she braids these memories, in a sustained, observant, poetic act of attention — and love.'

Marina Warner