Description
When Jeremy Harding was a child, his mother Maureen told him he was adopted. She described his natural parents as a Scandinavian sailor and a 'little Irish girl' who worked at Woolworth's. It was only later, as Harding set out to look for traces of his birth mother, that he began to understand who his adoptive mother really was - and the benign make-believe world she'd built for herself and her little boy.
Mother Country evokes a magical childhood spent in transit between Notting Hill Gate and a decrepit houseboat on the banks of the Thames. It is a detective quest, as Harding searches through the public record for a clue about his natural mother, and a rich social history of a lost London from the 1950s. Mother Country is a powerful true story, full of thrilling revelations, comic confusion and tender memories, about a man looking for the mother he'd never known and finding out how little he'd understood about the one he'd grown up with.
Mother Country by Jeremy Harding is a hugely moving and affecting literary memoir of adoption, secrets and the need to belong.
About the Author
Jeremy Harding is the author of Small Wars, Small Mercies: Journeys in Africa's Disputed Nations (1994) and The Uninvited, a report on clandestine migrants and asylum seekers in Western Europe, which won the Martha Gellhorn Award for journalism in 2001. His translations of Rimbaud's poetry were published by Penguin in 2004. He is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.
Reviews
"'Beautifully written, funny and sad, this book is simply captivating.' Cressida Connolly"
Book Information
ISBN 9780571212941
Author Jeremy Harding
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publisher Faber & Faber
Weight(grams) 170g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 126mm * 15mm
