My Hummingbird Father

When artist Dominique receives a letter from her dying father, a reckoning with repressed memories and a pull for romantic and familial love sends shockwaves through her life, as she journeys to Paris to face the places and events of her early years. Balanced with visits to the Venezuelan Amazon, where Dominique explores a spiritual and loving longing (meeting a young guide, Juan), a raw and tender unfolding of this love story is a parallel to the uncovering of the shocking truth of Dominique’s birth, and her parents’ relationship. Pascale Petit’s My Hummingbird Father is a beautifully lyrical debut novel in dialogue with Pascale’s Ondaatje and Laurel Prize-winning poetry collection, Mama Amazonica.

‘Petit is a passionate laureate of the natural world, but alive to the cruelty of human depredation.’ —Aingeal Clare, The Guardian

‘Beautifully sad, the imagery inexhaustible, the sorrow and torment both tempered and sharpened by the relish for language and the ingenuity of the imagination.’ —Simon Armitage

‘Mama Amazonica stitches parallels between the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and a mother and daughter’s experience of mental illness. We felt that in creating this duality she might have achieved what should have been impossible.’ —Moniza Alvi, Judge, The Laurel Prize

‘She has a powerful, imagistic authority over the landscape.’ —Daljit Nagra, Front Row, BBC Radio 4