Mehriban is born into an Uighur family in a village in eastern Kazakhstan in which everybody works on the local collective farm. She tells of the people among whom she grows up, and in particular of the women — daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers — their lives and loves, their resilience in the face of bereavement, injustice, hunger and cold, their folk wisdom and their irrepressible spirit.

Covering three generations, from the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s and the Great Patriotic War through to the chaos of perestroika and the new order following independence, A Mother’s Testament is an intimate and richly drawn portrait of life and customs in those times, told through a cast of memorable characters. It is also the tale of how Mehriban comes to write the story down and of how she follows her own daughter far from the village into the unknown, and realises her own true destiny.

A Mother’s Testament is at once the semi-autobiographical story of a people forced to display great strength in the face of changing fortunes and a saga of universal appeal that will not fail to move readers everywhere.

Robin Thomson