Red Dust Road

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books

You think adoption is a story which has an end. But the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending.

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, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red Dust Road is one of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In a book remarkable for its warmth and candour, Kay discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that what triumphs, ultimately, is love.

Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny.

‘Like the best memoirs, this one is written with novelistic and poetic flair. Red Dust Road is a fantastic, probing and heart-warming read’ – Independent

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.