Джеки Кей – лучшие книги

"Supremely humane.... Kay leaves us with a broad landscape of sweet tolerance and familial love". The New York Times Book Review

In her starkly beautiful and wholly unexpected tale, Jackie Kay delves into the most intimate workings of the human heart and mind and offers a triumphant tale of loving deception and lasting devotion.

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret, one that enrages his adopted son, Colman, leading him to collude with a tabloid journalist. Besieged by the press, his widow Millie flees to a remote Scottish village, where she seeks solace in memories of their marriage. The reminiscences of those who knew Joss Moody render a moving portrait of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, one that preserved a rare, unconditional love.

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, the journey that Jackie Kay undertakes in Red Dust Road is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In a book shining with warmth, humour and compassion, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that our internal landscapes are as important as those through which we move. Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is revelatory, redemptive and courageous, unique in its voice and universal in its reach. It is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny, and love.

Jackie's latest collection of poetry is full of the dramatic power associated with her work, and plenty of music too. She explores the theme of identity in poems about an older generation, especially grandmothers, about the old days and the new days, and places the poet associates with these people, who live dreamlike, isolated existences, geographically, but also in the memory.

Nature and the elements play a big role too: trees, the moon, the sea, fire. Jackie's style is both muscular and lyrical - one moment witty, the next melancholic, or gently surreal - and in this brilliant new collection, her poems are infused with warmth and colour: in particular, the colour RED.

Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl's adoption by a white Scottish couple- from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter.