Three months after Kyo Maclear's father dies in December 2018, she gets the result of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, desperately seeking answers from her ailing mother whose memories and English are failing. Maclear no longer speaks Japanese, her mother's first language, so she turns to her mother's second fluent tongue: the wild and green language of soil, seed, leaf and mulch. Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? What gets planted and what gets buried? Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes far beyond heredity, full of unflinching insights into grief, loyalty and the relationship between mothers and daughters.