By the Light of My Father's Smile: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) - Softcover

New Nation (28th Sept 1998) It’s been six years since Walker has written a novel, and this one does not disappoint. With a voice full of beauty, Walker explores the themes of sexuality and spirituality, life and death. The story centres around a black family – mother, father and two daughters, Susannah and Magdalena – who travel to the remote Sierras of Mexico to study the indigenous people. Their stay there, and what they learn or refuse to learn and one single event of deceit and denial has repercussions for the rest of their lives. The novel is magical one, moving with ease through time and space, between life and death. The scenes are seen through the eyes of the living and the eyes of the dead. The book is sexually explicit, a considerable departure for Walker, although her sensual prose never descends into the gratuitous.

The Times (5th Dec 1998) By The Light of My Father’s Smile is a poorly titled but brilliant, sensuous and life affirming novel of family life destroyed by lies, and the redemptive power of sexual love. In order to study a remote tribe living in South America, Susannah Robinson’s atheist father poses as a pastor, and his spirited and passionate wife as the pastor’s unassuming spouse. Both Susannah and her sister, Magdalena, witness their parent’s true selves at home and grow resentful of their public hypocrisy. The book is fraught with ambivalence about most aspects of life and love.

New Woman (1st Jan 1998) ‘She feels fingers and then warm lips upon her breast, but there is a lessening of intensity...it is as she suspected. Pauline is waiting for her to ask for it...Oh, please go down on me.’ This book certainly got me hot under the collar. Walker’s novels always probe into sex and emotions with a raw intensity and this is no exception. Susannah is a writer exploring the links between her sexual experience and life itself while her sister is embittered by unrequited love. And watching over their struggles is their father, now an angel. Sex, beauty, life and death – all ingredients for a delicious read.

Diva (December 1998) This is a beautiful book, powered by the belief system of the tribal Mundo people of Mexico. The oneness they feel with the earth and the universe, their gentleness, their links between sex and spirituality, are contrasted with the racism, colonialism and woman-hatred of white culture. The book is peopled with compelling folk, from the alienated daughter Magdalena, aka June, grown into a green-haired giant of a lecturer whose demise is the least believable thing about her, to the wise and oppressed Greek ‘dwarf’ (hmmmm, could have gone badly wrong, this) who inherits the resources to live out her final years in luxury. These people, marginalized by and scathing of the mainstream, are so inspiring that their political debates seem integral to the novel. But if the swing between magic realism and political realism is a risky one, Walker knows it (at times, it seems she knows everything). Towards the end, two dead men have the following exchange: "But surely you people have ideas!" "Of course we do. But we know that there is no limit to them. After that, story!" And what a story it is.