Canadian Writers Abroad

Review of Almost English by Barbara Sibbald. Bayeux Arts Digital-Traditional Publishing, Calgary, 2025.
Reviewed by Gabriella Goliger.

The British Raj, which ruled India from 1858-1947, had concepts of racial purity that call to mind those of Nazi Germany. Anyone not 100% “white” was considered lesser. Having even one “native” grandparent could mark you for life. Barbara Sibbald’s fascinating new novel Almost English takes us into that stratified world through the vicissitudes of the Turner family, struggling to establish itself in a wild and remote corner of northern India in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. 

Stephen Turner was born in India to a respected English businessman. Raised as English, educated in England, he acts and feels Anglo to the core. But his grandmother was Parsi, which brands him as inferior to whites and even “half-baked bread” to some natives. The stigma doesn’t faze Lily, the full-blooded white girl he woos. Stephen is bright, capable, handsome, athletic, has excellent manners, and is so much more interesting than those stodgy other suitors. Despite her father’s warnings about likely poverty because of Stephen’s uncertain prospects, she leaps into the marriage with both feet. The father isn’t wrong about those prospects. Time and again Stephen tries to rise in the Raj administrative hierarchy. Competent, ambitious, adventurous, he receives challenging and even dangerous postings, most notably in a wild region along the Afghan border. His superiors use him but overlook him for promotions and better pay.  

Stephen’s heroic efforts at acceptance in a racist Raj makes him a somewhat tragic figure. More endearing still is Lily, who faces hardships with amazing resilience. Over 17 years she bears seven children, one in a tent during a perilous journey. She learns to cope with earthquakes, snakes, insects, blistering heat, disease and harrowing accidents, plus financial woes, uprootings, social ostracism, and deep loneliness when Stephen is away for long spells due to work. She’s resourceful, managing the household, running a dairy, and selling honey and tea from her brother-in-law’s estate. During the family’s stay in a desolate region, though entirely self-trained, she sets up a nursing clinic to tend to illness and injury among tribal women and children. She’s devoted to her children and her husband, despite disagreeing with him about the virtues of the Raj.   

Sibbald’s book is a thoroughly engaging read, but not in the way of conventional novels with tight plots and clear story arcs. Instead, Almost English has the texture of real life, with its ups and downs and sideways meanderings. That’s because the work is a hybrid, a blend of fiction and memoir.

Stephen and Lily Turner were real people, Sibbald’s great-grandparents, whose story captivated her since childhood. Family lore, Sibbald’s mother’s genealogical research, letters, and deep research into the era all form the basis of the work. But Sibbald felt she needed to break out of the confines of memoir to bring the story to life. The bare bones are factual, while the descriptions, dialogue and characters’ thoughts and feelings are imagined. Sibbald makes the combination work through the strength of her writing. 

Despite a plethora of episodes and detail, the author holds the reader’s interest through lively dialogue, polished prose, and interesting literary devices. One of these is the playful chapter subhead, reminiscent of early English novels. For example, “Chapter Four – In which Lily is jealous, a ghazi attacks, a book prompts disclosures, a dear friend grieves, malaise lingers, and Lily delivers an ultimatum.” The device does the double job of foreshadowing and helping tie disparate pieces together.

The author gives the complex historical context of Baluchistan (then part of India, now Pakistan) of that era, but not to the point of drowning us in history. She renders sights, sounds, textures, smells, and the spirit of the place from the very first sentences. 

“Vayu, Hindu lord of the wind – of breath itself – guardian of Northwest India blew through the snow-covered Sulaiman Mountains bringing frigid air into the frontier town of Quetta in British India’s North. The wind swept along the snow-packed streets, swirled around stone government buildings, making its way to a modest wood bungalow where it rattled the window frames and found its way inside.”

Interspersed through the book are 13 brief separate sections, Interstices, in which the author reflects on what drove her to this work — the quest for belonging and a deeper sense of identity, revealing how her own story is entwined with that of her forebears. These sections also recount Sibbald’s research travels to Scotland, England, and India, as she sought out long-lost relatives and immersed herself to the extent possible in the landscape Lily and Stephen once inhabited. The interstices are poignant and worthwhile additions rather than distractions. 

Family memoirs tend to be of interest mostly to the family involved. Sibbald did well to bring in fiction and thus lift this story to more universal heights.  

Barbara Sibbald is an award-winning author of five books of fiction. For her historical novel, Almost English (Bayeux Arts, 2025), she travelled to India twice for research, including a visit to Kolkata’s South Park Cemetery in 2007. (See “Parsing a Tombstone.“) In 2015, she was in Dharmsala, including a visit to her great-uncle’s tea plantation in Sidhbari, to which her great-grandfather eventually retired. Following this, she took long trips to the United Kingdom, devoted to research. She has also travelled extensively for her journalism work.

Her collection of short fiction, The Museum of Possibilities (Porcupine’s Quill, 2017), won gold in the Foreword Indies 2017 Book Awards for short fiction and silver in the eLit Book Awards for the digital version. Kitchen Chronicles was an online novel published in 52 installments by Ottawa Magazine, and The Book of Love: Guidance in Affairs of the Heart (General Store Publishing House, 2011) is both a novel and (fictional) self-help book. Her novel, Regarding Wanda (Bunkhouse Press, 2006), was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award.

Gabriella Goliger is an award-winning novelist and short story writer with three published titles: Song of Ascent (Raincoast Books, 2000); Girl Unwrapped (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010) and Eva Salomon’s War (Bedazzled Ink Publishing, 2018). Her newly completed (unpublished) novel is a work of literary historical fiction set in the Berlin of 1933. She lived in Jerusalem from 1970 to 1973.

• Sidhbari at Wikivoyage.
• Barbara Sibbald, Bayeux Arts, and Porcupine’s Quill.
• Interview with Barbara Sibbald at Resilient Writers.
• Sibbald’s poetry in CWA: News of the World; and Parsing a Tombstone.
• Sibbald on Japanese gardening, Ottawa Citizen (24 July 2025).
• Foreword Indies Book Awards.
• Gabriella Goliger, and Arsenal Pulp Press.
• The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind by Simon Winchester, HarperCollins, 2025. (See “Vayu, Hindu lord of the wind” above.)

header photo: Bougainvillea grown from a switch of the plant at Stephen Turner’s house, on the tea plantation in Sidhbari; photo: Barbara Sibbald