Rachel Manley, granddaughter and daughter of two of Jamaica's national leaders, tells the story of the brilliant and artistic Manleys, Jamaica's most prominent and glamorous political family, and the house in which they lived, Drumblair. Manley vividly recreates the world in which she came of age in this intimate and captivating memoir of the people who most changed Jamaica's intellectual, social, and cultural landscape.

In the wake of her father's death, Rachel Manley turned inward to try to understand him and to explore the impact of those final moments. Her father, the charismatic, controversial prime minister of Jamaica, had stood at the heart of a decade of radical social reform in the 1970s. From her father's bedside during his last six months of life, Manley searches the shadows that he cast on her as a child and as a woman. She 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. Slipstream is a shining portrait of one man's enormous heart and undying spirit.