Mother's Testament

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 Pa...