Ancestors: Adventures in a Foreign Country

This highly original novel by the internationally acclaimed author Graham Holderness is part historical novel, part contemporary chronicle, part autobiographical fiction. It explores the challenges of personal ancestry and heritage, and the contemporary loyalties of us all in a rapidly changing country. / Holderness tells the story of a typical modern intellectual, nearing the end of his career as an academic, a radical political activist and internationalist facing fundamental choices of how to live and where to belong.

Graham Holderness is a writer and critic who has published, as author or editor, more than sixty books, many on Shakespeare, and hundreds of chapters and articles of criticism, theory and theology. His more recent work has pioneered methods of critical-creative writing, exemplified by Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011); Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Re-writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, 2014): Samurai Shakespeare​ (EER, 2021). He has published several works of fiction: The Prince of Denmark (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001; EER, 2021); Ecce Homo (Bloomsbury, 2014); Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (Top Hat Books, 2014); and Meat, Murder, Malfeasance, Medicine and Martyrdom: Smithfield Stories (EER, 2019).