The Desire of Every Living Thing: A Search for Home

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

For most of his life, the award-winning writer Don Gillmor never dreamed
that his maternal grandmother, Georgina Maitland, was anything other
than what she appeared to be: a down-to-earth, thrifty, churchgoing,
Winnipeg matron who had emigrated from her native Scotland at the turn
of the century. It took a major health breakdown and the subsequent
discovery of a false birth date by medical authorities to pry the secret
out of Gillmor’s 80-year-old grandma ... she was illegitimate!
Georgina’s real mother had run away, in disgrace, to South Africa
while the rest of the family moved to Canada to start a new life free of
shame and notoriety.

His grandmother’s revelation tweaked Gillmor’s curiosity about the
rest of his Scottish kinsmen, a branch of his family he had always
written off as somewhat colorless compared to the Irish ancestors from
his father’s side. Gillmor decided to travel to Scotland to trace his
Scottish roots and attempt to understand the moral and social forces
that existed in Georgina’s hometown at the time of her birth. He found
a land steeped in blood, sea water, sheep, sin, North Sea oil, and
religion. He discovered that one of his ancestors lost the family farm
on a pool table, and Gillmor nearly came to worse grief himself after a
night of snooker, Scottish curry, and karaoke in Glasgow.

The storyline expands slowly from a thumbnail sketch of Gillmor’s
ancestors to a broad overview of the history of the Shetlands, Scotland,
the Free Church of Scotland, Winnipeg, and Canada’s west. Somehow
Gillmor, whose research and writing skills are clearly evident, manages
to keep all these balls spinning in the air without dropping one of
them. After reading this engaging book, you may never look at your own
“dull” relatives in the same light again.