'This will be read for many, many years to come as a classic not just of the memoir genre but of contemporary writing' Simon Schama

'This will be read for many, many years to come as a classic not just of the memoir genre but of contemporary writing' Simon Schama

'Astonishing' Thandiwe Newton

'As gripping as any thriller' Mail on Sunday

'A masterpiece' Elizabeth Gilbert

'Powerful' The Times

At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother.

Heartbreakingly clear-eyed and tender, Memorial Drive is a daughter's act of love - and an unflinching excavation of the wounds that never heal. For as Trethewey tells her story, and reclaims her mother's, she lays bare the indelible scars of slavery and racism on the soul of a troubled nation.

'Sheer artistry ... Trethewey's masterpiece suggests that the greatest act of defiance a black person can do is to remember' * Financial Times*