This highly original novel by the internationally acclaimed author Graham Holderness is an historical novel which is also part contemporary chronicle, part autobiographical. It explores, in principle, 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. The focal figure is self-described as rootless, unanchored, a citizen of the world, but with no homeland of his own. Yet on his sixtieth birthday his son, who has taken an interest in family history, gives him as a present a genealogical DNA test. From this modest intervention flow various unforeseen consequences which ultimately turn his world upside down. Exploring an unknown history, he realises that his own ancestry is nothing like what he believ