Overview

"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."

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9781844676576

Table of Contents

Reviews

Beautifully written, funny and sad, thisbook is simply captivating.--Cressida Connolly

Beautifully written, funny and sad, this book is simply captivating. --Cressida Connolly

Harding is a conjurer. Give him a long-since demolished stairwell, and he'll give you a world--its sound, its smell, the feeling that you could stumble upon it still. --Rachel Cooke, Observer <br><br> Stunning. --Amanda Heller, Boston Globe <br><br> Beautifully written, funny and sad, this book is simply captivating. --Cressida Connolly, Daily Telegraph <br><br> Fluid and invigorating ... a delicate and absorbing account of Harding's investigation into the circumstances of his adoption. --John Palattella, Nation <br><br> Harding's story is that of an adopted boy growing up in London, and his decision later to search for his natural mother. Readers get a detailed chronicle of the search and its ramifications, turning up hidden facets of the family Harding thought he knew. -- Library Journal <br><br> An able, imaginative work of kinship and family. -- Kirkus <br><br> Its colorful, insightful revelations about his adoptive parents and compelling discoveries about his birth mother give this slender memoir a special magic and beauty that will grip the reader long after the final page is turned. -- Publishers Weekly

Author Information

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.

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