Red Pockets
  • Published: 24 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781802061345
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Red Pockets

An Offering

Formats & editions
Hardback
22 Jul 2025
EBook
24 Apr 2025
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A haunting family memoir about what we owe our ancestors and our descendants, from an unforgettable new voice

'Part of me knew what the hungry ghosts wanted all along, what they still want. It is not vengeance. No, they want something else, but we refuse to listen. They want us to face up to our broken obligations.'

Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors, making offerings of food and incense to prevent them from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune. Yet for the past century, a time ruptured by war and revolution, many tombs have been left unattended. Following a record year of wildfires, Alice Mah returns to her family’s rice village in South China, and discovers that her ancestors are almost forgotten, and there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid.

Here Mah chronicles her journey from the rice villages of South China to her home in post-industrial England, through the Chinatowns of Western Canada where she grew up, to the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors’ neglected graves. Her research on pollution gives way to growing eco-anxiety, culminating in a crisis of spiritual belief.

A haunting blend of memoir, cultural history and environmental exploration, Red Pockets confronts the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, while searching for an acceptable offering. What do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?
  • Published: 24 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781802061345
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240
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Praise for Red Pockets

Red Pockets is a fascinating exploration of the linkages between ancestral inheritance, diasporic belonging, and our climate future. Mah takes us on a keenly observed, immersive journey, from an astute sociological portrait of a Chinese clan village to toxic petrochemical towns to the green hills of Glasgow, and offers surprising, beautifully interconnected insights on material and psychic debt, climate despair, trauma and hope. I read it in one sitting, which took me on a moving and often unexpected journey

Aube Rey Lescure

A beautifully written, deeply fascinating and richly thought-provoking book which looks, bravely, at what it means to live at this most ecologically destructive time; about what we inherit, and what we leave behind. Moving, important and finely crafted

Lucy Jones

Fear of the future, an ache for the past, the present awash with disquiet: into this turmoil, Alice Mah's book appears like a little red boat, keeping hope afloat against all odds

Anita Roy, Guardian

Mah asks beautiful questions on grief, climate and identity that are as urgent as they are pensive. The result is a spiritual Bildungsroman that envelops the reader in a meditation on past, present and future

Jenny Lau

Mah’s rich, reflective book is focused on a different type of connection between the past and the present... I had not read a book making these links before, and it is a compelling and moving narrative

Maya Goodfellow, Guardian

Mah's writing is intelligent and highly observational... she's a strong, lucid storyteller

Mark Rowe, Geographical

Moving and imaginative... One of the most unusual and powerful books I’ve read in a long time

Rosemary Goring, The Herald

Sensitive and sensible... Mah seems fortuitously well-placed to be between despair and fortitude

Scotsman