Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of thirteen books, including Abundant Light, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, and Blood Sisters. She has been published in <...

Low Road, The
A Scottish Family Memoir

Valerie Miner

"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.

Utterly engrossing, The Low Road navigates between family fable and fact as Miner leads us through her discoveries about back-street abortion and tuberculosis, orphanhood, exile, estrangement, and reconciliation to reach a place of acceptance and understanding.

Reviews

"Though her story is deeply emotional, filled with sad losses, including the loss of her mother, Miner's reticence and lack of self-indulgence have helped her to dignify the narrative with humor, to focus on the larger questions, to work past blame and to treat her Scottish family - especially her mother's 'extraordinary, ordinary life' - with compassion and respect."

- The Women's Review of Books