SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION WRITING

A poignant personal narrative about family, cultural history, and ecology, and a quest to understand what we owe our ancestors and our descendants from an unforgettable new voice.

Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors. They make offerings of food and incense to prevent their ancestors from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune, illnesses and crop failures. Yet for the past century, the tombs of many have been left unattended because of the ruptures of war and revolution. Ninety years after her grandfather’s last visit and fifty years after her last relative died in the village, Alice Mah returns to her ancestral home in South China. While she finds clan members who still remember her family, there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid.

In this haunting blend of memoir, cultural history and environmental exploration, Mah chronicles her search for an offering to the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, which takes her from the rice villages of South China to post-industrial England, to the Chinatowns of British Columbia where she grew up and the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors’ neglected graves, which culminates in a crisis of spiritual belief: What do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?