Mother Country
Memoir of an Adopted Boy
Published on 5. May 2020
224 pages
978-1-78960-117-6 (ISBN)
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 in a grocery. 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 built for herself and her little boy. Evoking a magical childhood spent in transit between west London and a decrepit houseboat on the banks of the River Thames, Mother Country is both a detective quest, as Harding searches through the public records for clues about his natural mother, and a rich social history of a lost London from the 1950s. Mother Country is a powerful true story about a man looking for the mother he had never known and finding out how little he understood the one he had grown up with.
More details
Edition
Ebook UK & RoW
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Reflowable
ISBN-13
978-1-78960-117-6 (9781789601176)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
11/2010
Verso Books
€17.50
Article exhausted; check different version
Person
Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. His books include The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man's Gate, Small Wars, Small Mercies, and Mother Country.
Content
- Cover Page
- Halftitle Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Adoption: An Introduction to the US Edition
- Preface
- I. Names
- II. Places
- III. Fables
- IV. Characters
- V. Ghosts
- VI. Bearings
- VII. People
- VIII. Honours
- IX. Margaret
- X. Laughing Water
- XI. Relations
- XII. Voices
- XIII. Feasts
- XIV. The Falling Boy
- Acknowledgements
