This book defies categorisation. It's a history, it's a novel, almost it's a kind of archaeology, an investigation into the reality of the past and an exploration of that uncertain borderland which lies between fact and fiction. Using archive material Mawer has picked through the traces left behind by his mid-nineteenth-century ancestors to find out how they might have been and what might have happened to them. Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize 2023.