In 2016, the author found a letter in her aunt's attic written in September 1931, from her grandmother May to her father Leonard Sutton telling him that her husband Fred had shot and killed their nanny, thinking she was a leopard. How could he have made such a mistake? Fred was a crack shot. If he shot her, he meant to shoot her.
May Sutton's two curated archive boxes were in that attic too. One chest contained envelopes as if chapters of a book about her, a scion of the famous horticultural company, Sutton Seeds and pioneer settler in Kenya between the two World Wars. After her marriage in Kenya in 1924 to Frederick Chater-Jack, she creates a successful horticultural nursery while they battle disease, hail, locusts, and the global economic crisis, before sailing back in 1939 into the gathering storm of war.
The Seedsman’s Daughter is that story, but not as May prescribed. It is not a romanticised Anglo-colonial memoir ignoring the ambiguous and disturbing killing of Mrs. Kuhn. It depicts the long shadows of imperial impunity. It asks the questions they did not, or would not, ask.
