
Mother Country
Jeremy Harding(Author)
Faber & Faber (Publisher)
Published on 6. April 2006
Book
Hardback
192 pages
978-0-571-21289-7 (ISBN)
Description
This is a hugely moving and affecting literary memoir of adoption, a family mystery, and the need to belong. 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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 219 mm
Width: 142 mm
Weight
342 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-571-21289-7 (9780571212897)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jeremy Harding is the author of Small Wars, Small Mercies: Jorneys in Africa's Disputed Nations (1994) and The Uninvited, a report on clandestine migrants and asylum seekers in Western Europe, which won the Martha Gelhorn 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.