Beginning with a peony bush passed down through generations of women in her family, Kirsty Bell's Mother's Mother is a hybrid memoir of matriarchal inheritance. The realization that she is the final woman in her maternal line compels her to trace the faint yet persistent currents that flow between past and present.





Spanning a century and a half, the lives of her grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother in the Scottish Lowlands reveal a family past shaped by poverty, class mobility and global upheaval. Bell weaves these personal narratives with social history, archival traces and literary forebears – from Mary Shelley to Muriel Spark – to offer a richly textured meditation on the regulation of women's bodies and the silencing of their voices across generations.





Written in fluid prose that reaches beyond family history to the collective, Mother's Mother is an erudite and moving work about the near-impossible task of recovering past lives while asking what, of them, endures within us.



Kirsty Bell is a British-born writer and critic living in Berlin. She is the author of The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin (2022) which has been translated into several languages, and The Artist's House(2013), for which she received a Warhol Foundation Grant. A contributing editor at frieze from 2011 to 2021 and a regular contributor since 2001, she has also published widely in other magazines and journals and in more than eighty exhibition catalogues, including most recently on Käthe Kollwitz for MOMA, NY. She lectures and teaches regularly at art schools in Amsterdam, Malmö, Vienna and elsewhere.