Precious

Product Description

Where are you from? is a question I always find hard to answer. 1971: an ad in Nursery World. Private foster parents required for a three-month-old baby
- me. The lucky applicants are a 57-year-old white woman & her daughter who love babies especially black babies. My mother arrives a haughty Nigerian woman in a convertible with a moses basket on the seat beside her setting the net curtains in this all-white council estate twitching. & though the whole place makes my privileged mothers skin crawl she returns to London with an empty basket beside her choosing this home for me because unusually for the estate my foster mother talks proper & Ill need a posh white accent for the bright future I have ahead of me. Ill cling on to that idea
- that Ive a bright future ahead of me
- even though theres nothing in my upbringing to warrant it. Even though my mothers love consists of long absences confusing behaviour & dauntingly high expectations. Even though my foster mothers love is overwhelming & suffocating. Even though I seem to be a magnet for abusive sexual attention from men I barely know. Even though the authorities have no idea where to put me or where I belong & nor really do I. & even when I fall pregnant at eighteen & find myself back in the rural town Id tried to escape from with a tiny baby dependent on me I still think the futures out there. Ill find it whatever it takes. Precious" is the story of growing up black in a white community of struggling to find an identity that fits amid conflicting messages of deciphering a childhood full of secrets & dysfunction. Painfully honest swerving from farce to tragedy " Precious" has a spirit that refuses to be crushed."