In the wake of her beloved father’s death, Rachel Manley turned inward to try to understand him and to explore the impact of those final moments. Michael Manley?the charismatic, controversial prime minister of Jamaica?had stood at the heart of a decade of radical social reform in the 1970s. From the vantage of her father’s bedside during his last six months of life, his daughter searches the shadows that he cast on her as a child and as a woman?the shadows that familiarly touch daughters and fathers but are inevitably thrown more fiercely by famous parents over their children.
With honesty and deep feeling Manley shares her love and pain, and explores how the enduring bonds that held them were tested time and again, not only by the ordinary conflicts of family life, but by the heavy demands of the political arena and by a succession of five marriages. Slipstream is a shining portrait of one man’s enormous heart and undying spirit, and a testament to the ways in which courage and love can inspire us all to soar.

RACHEL MANLEY is the author of the memoir Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, which won the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction in 1997, and Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers. She has also published three books of poetry and edited Edna Manley: The Diaries, a collection of her grandmother’s journals. Manley is a New York Public Library Fellow, a Pierre Berton Fellow, a Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio), and a former Bunting Fellow for Literature at Radcliffe College. She serves on the creative writing faculty at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has won Jamaica’s prestigious Centennial Medal for Poetry. Manley divides her time between Toronto and Jamaica. She has two sons, Drum and Luke.

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