Pilgrim State celebrates place, the life-affirming nature of family and the bonds between mothers and daughters that can never be broken.

Jackie Walker’s moving memoir about her mother Dorothy Walker, Pilgrim State, tells the story of Dorothy, a young Jamaican woman who is incarcerated in Pilgrim State mental hospital in New York.

On release she is deported from the US to Jamaica with her three children, she the moves to London where she struggles to raise at family on her own in cold 60s London. She suffers racial abuse and ill health and the children are taken into care on more than one occasion but the mother’s love for her children is so strong that Pilgrim State is a joyous read.

Dorothy’s story opens in 1951 at the Pilgrim State mental facility in New York State. She has come to New York from Jamaica to study medicine but she has been forcibly sectioned and is battling to keep her children and her sanity. She will struggle with both all her life. Dorothy and her children return to Jamaica before finally making a home in London in the early 60s. After the vibrancy of Harlem and the warmth of Jamaica, London appears grey and unwelcoming. Here they face prejudice, poverty and separation but they make the city their home, a place where their love and ability to find hope and joy even in the most desperate circumstances can finally take root.

Pilgrim State celebrates place, the life-affirming nature of family and the bonds between mothers and daughters that can never be broken. Haunting, powerful and beautifully written, Dorothy’s story resonates long after the final page.

Jacqueline Walker arrived in Britain in 1959. She has been a teacher, a mother of three, taught creative writing as well has having completed two Arvon writing courses. Pilgrim State is her first book.

ISBN: 978-0340960783
Published by Sceptre
Publication Date: 10th April 2008
Price: £14.99