A Stranger at My Table: The postcolonial story of a family caught in the half-life of empires

By Ivo de FigueiredoTranslated by Deborah Dawkin April 2019. Paperback.336 pages with 32 black and white illustrations.$22.95 | 9780999754474 From the acclaimed biographer of Norway’s most treasured cultural icons, Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch, comes the story of a migrant family in search of roots and for each other. Ivo de Figueiredo’s lyrical and imagistic memoir navigates a difficult search for the origins of his estranged father, which opens a door to a family history spanning four continents, five centuries and the rise and fall of two empires. At the age of 45, Figueiredo traces his father’s family in the diaspora. Having emigrated from the Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India to British East Africa, and later to the West, his father’s ancestors were Indians with European ways and values—trusted servants of the imperial powers. But in postcolonial times they became homeless, redundant, caught between the age of empires and the age of nations. With lush descriptio