'This is a history shaken by intimacy - a brave and rigorously humane book' Sean Hewitt

How 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 families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.

About the Author
Clair Wills is a critic and cultural historian. She is the author of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, which won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland During the Second World War, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, Dublin 1916, The Best Are Leaving, and most recently The Family Plot: Three Pieces on Containment. Wills is the regius professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge.

Reviews
In its account of one family's history of silence and secrecy, Clair Wills has written a compelling book which demonstrates the uncanny universality of even the most personal stories. Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present, this is a history shaken by intimacy - a brave and rigorously humane book. -- Sean Hewitt
If the past is a mass of tangled wool, Clair Wills frees a long strand and knits it into clarity, line by line, inviting the reader to see the complexity of the pattern she reveals. Written with elegance and erudition, Missing Persons is an extraordinary, moving achievement. -- Doireann Ni Ghriofa
Clair Wills retrieves from time's abyss a speculative history of universal import. This is a penetrating and affecting study, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the profound contradictions, the secrets and lies that define post-famine Ireland. -- Paul Lynch
Clair Wills has written a book of unusual subtlety and power. Part memoir and social history, part familial detective story, it's a work that lays bare the strength and terrible frailty of the bonds that are supposed to bind us together. A superb work of narrative nonfiction. -- Francisco Garcia
A deeply absorbing account, related with compassion in elegant prose, of how a family's past becomes embedded in its present. -- Danielle McLaughlin
This is a brilliant, poignant, discomforting book but one that has the beauty of honesty and the ultimate restorative kindness that truth-telling offers. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex typology and legacy of family secrets. -- Katherine O'Donnell
In this powerful memoir, Wills manages to excavate the truth about silence. Her vision as a historian reaches for the central question, why and how Irish people kept such dark secrets. How a nation of storytellers became so good at keeping violence concealed from themselves. How the information was kept, manipulated, disremembered under layers of talk into a vast store of collective forgetting. This is not only the story of Ireland in the past, but who we all are and what we have become. -- Hugo Hamilton
Missing Persons is as close to perfect as a memoir can be; the richness of its subject honed to a poised and discerning brevity, written in unexpectedly lambent prose. It is the sum of the author's life: both the family history she carries with and within her, but also the four decades of research and analysis that have been her intellectual existence. Only she could have written it, but it will speak to and about the lives of many. -- Lucy Scholes * Financial Times *
She is deft at unpicking lies, evasions and gaps in the record, grasping that these things have political as well as private meaning... an act of fairly radical reframing. -- Olivia Laing * The Guardian *
An expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist. -- John Banville * The Observer *
Always compelling and deeply moving... an unforgettable account, in microcosm, of the world of Catholic Ireland in the 20th Century: the incarceration of the so-called sinful and the emigration of others, leaving a fragmented country of secrets, enigmas and buried guilt. -- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * Mail on Sunday *
The stories she uncovers are remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human... Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention. -- Laura Hackett * The Sunday Times *
An affecting and enraging book, part memoir, part national history, about Wills's attempt to uncover the truth about her family and the hundreds of others like it. -- Pippa Bailey * New Statesman *
Not just a vivid, compelling account of Clair's family and ancestry, but an intriguing snapshot of Ireland's social history ... rigorously researched .. empathetic. * The Irish Independent *



Book Information
ISBN 9780241640951
Author Clair Wills
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint Allen Lane
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 320g
Dimensions(mm) 218mm * 138mm * 26mm