Louise Doughty

Novelist Louise Doughty gives us a gently meandering recital of the tall tales and fond vignettes passed down through numerous generation of her family. She begins with 'Spank', her great-great-great-grandmother, a pure-blood Romany gypsy and stern matriarch, who sailed to England to give her unborn son a better future, though not with immediate success, as he spent most of his early life living in a graveyard.

Although many of her family stories are light-hearted, Doughty brings her talk to a serious conclusion. She tells us that around one million Romany people died during World War II, and her family would almost certainly have perished had 'Spank' not been an economic migrant. Roma are the fastest growing ethnic minority in Europe, she argues, yet they are being deported from France in their thousands. Here Doughty makes the case for tolerance and integration through the framework of her own family history.