A long plane journey to Kristiansand in southern Norway meant that I was able to finish Sylvia Brownrigg’s remarkable memoir/detective story, The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found.  I remember her telling me the gist of it: that a package of papers addressed to her father by her grandmother had been found in the basement of her family’s house in Los Angeles, which enabled her to uncover elements of her father’s side of the family previously unknown, including the circumstances of her grandfather’s death – was it suicide ? – in Kenya.  It is about the complexities of family life.  Did it help that I know some of the people described ?  Not necessarily.  It’s about generational dinsinterment and the lost story of her father who scarcely knew or met his father and her rediscovery of it all from the package.