Miner Valerie

Here Valerie Miner provides an account of her family's migration from Edinburgh's tenements across the world. Focusing on the life journeys of her grandmother, her mother and herself, Miner searches for truth about family members, unveiling family secrets and missing histories.

Abundant Light, Valerie Miner's fourth collection of short fiction, reveals a master storyteller writing in her prime. This collection looks closely at definitions of family and asks how this fragile and frightening entity can shape us, nurture us, or even destroy us. These stories also explore friendship as it is enriched by differences in nationality, race, class, and gender. Whether set in Calcutta, Cornwall, Alberta, Edinburgh, or the Coastal Range of California, each story is imbued with a resonant spirit of place. Light is a presence and metaphor in each of these stories, physical light as well as light ranging through human insight and reflection, as characters face the possibilities of forgiveness, acceptance and reunion.

Here is a collection of short stories that spans the globe but also finds time to examine the quiet shifts in an individual’s sense of self. In Trespassing and Other Stories, Valerie Miner touches on the lives and histories of many people in different parts of the world, yet links them with her careful perceptions and empathies.Two women visiting a weekend cottage defend their property from intruders but find their own sexual identity violated. A Chinese woman spins silk and elongates the thread of life and immunity. A child learns to swim and also some powerful lessons about adulthood. An Arab boy seeks his father among visiting U.S. tourists. A London widow has her life and her memories stirred by a young visitor.Valerie Miner skillfully employs trespassing as a theme and metaphor, following her characters across borders of generation, politics, sexuality, morality, national identity - always asking provocative questions and raising intriguing contradictions. Whether writing about Africa, Europe, North America, or Asia, about rape, work, colonialism, or childhood, she brings her own passionate sensibility to bear. Miner writes with strength and wit, and evokes a range of voices that will delight both fans and new readers alike.

Blood Sisters is a gripping story created with themes of real substance and wide appeal. While this sizzling novel is considered a classic of 1970s feminist literary fiction, the story is all too timely today as we face violent debate about national and ethnic autonomy in Ireland and elsewhere. Journalists witness ground wars and terrorist responses in detailed news reports, but Valerie Miner has divined a passionate full-blooded story about the individuals and families behind those headlines.At the heart of Blood Sisters are two cousins, one Irish, one American, who grew up steeped in their mothers’ ideals of the 1916 Uprising. The two young women try to understand each other’s views, to cross the blurry lines between private and political life, but are divided by their separate histories and often despair at the possibility of comprehension, let alone reconciliation.Blood Sisters intricately combines important issues within the tense format of a thriller. Miner subtly explores the relationships among women of different generations, unexpected and unacceptable romance, the daily dramas of immigrant life, and the struggle of Irish people to discover and create their own identity and autonomy.Blood Sisters with its suspenseful story, its crucial questions, its vibrant humor and its evocative descriptions is a tour de force by one of the most important writers of her generation.

This is the story I have been writing for my whole life. With my life. writes Valerie Miner in this elegant and compassionate account of her family's migration from Edinburgh's tenements across the world. The Low Road explores location and dislocation in a large, poverty stricken Scottish family. Focusing on the life journeys of her grandmother, her mother, and herself, Miner searches for truth about family members, unveiling family secrets and missing histories.This powerful and moving memoir is a dramatic passage through poverty, immigration, and national and sexual identity. Utterly engrossing, the book navigates between family fable and fact as Miner leads us through her discoveries about back-street abortion and tuberculosis, orphanhood, exile, estrangement, and reconciliation to reach a place of acceptance and understanding.