MISSING PERSONS, OR MY GRANDMOTHERS SECRETS

Non Fiction Book of the Year 2024 Irish Book Awards A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year Remarkable touching tragic and terribly human Sunday Times Enthralling close to perfect it will speak to and about the lives of many Financial Times Expertly crafted with all the skill of a master novelist John Banville ObserverHow far would you go for the missing When Clair Wills was in her twenties she discovered she had a cousin she had never met Born in a Mother and Baby Home in 1950s Ireland Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers Yet she was never told of her existence How could a whole family a whole country abandon unmarried mothers and their children erasing them from history To discover the missing pieces of her family s story Clair searched across archives and nations in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence stories secrets silences The result is a moving exquisitely told story of the secrets