Mother Country: Memoir of an Adopted Boy
Paperback, 224 pages
ISBN: 9781844676576
November 2010
$17.95
Reviews
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“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.”
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“Stunning.”
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“Beautifully written, funny and sad, this book is simply captivating.”
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“Fluid and invigorating ... a delicate and absorbing account of Harding's investigation into the circumstances of his adoption.”
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“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.”
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“An able, imaginative work of kinship and family.”
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“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.”
Blog
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Wilmers and Harding in the US
Mary-Kay Wilmers and Jeremy Harding will be embarking on an east-coast tour of the US this month. This is a rare opportunity for Americans to hear from Mary-Kay Wilmers, author of The Eitingons and editor of the London Review of Books, and Jeremy Harding, author of Mother Country and an LRB contributing editor, on the role of memoir in contemporary letters.
Wilmers and Harding will be joined by guests including Michael Wood and James Shapiro in Boston, New York, Princeton, and New Haven. We hope to see you at one of their talks ...
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The Boston Globe on Jeremy Harding's "stunning" memoir, Mother Country
In a recent piece for the Boston Globe, reviewer Amanda Heller reads Jeremy Harding's memoir, Mother Country, as a comment on national character:
If the secrecy surrounding adoption in America has to do with sex, in England, just as revealing of national character, it has to do with class. Harding's quest soon led him to the stunning realization that his own origins were not the only ones his parents had deliberately obscured.
Visit the Boston Globe to read the full review.
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"Delicate and absorbing"—The Nation on Jeremy Harding's Mother Country
The Nation calls Jeremy Harding's Mother Country "a delicate and absorbing account of Harding's investigation into the circumstances of his adoption" in a lovely new review of the book.
John Palattella, The Nation's books editor, goes on to describe how
with persistence and luck, Harding learns his natural mother's identity and discovers, contrary to his belief, that Margaret is alive and living in West London near the housing projects where she was pregnant with him. But the book's big surprise concerns [his adoptive mother] Maureen. From discussions with old friends of Margaret's, Harding learns that there were no Dalmatians or skiing trips for Maureen. Rather, there was a childhood in public housing and later a marriage (her first, and not to Jeremy's adoptive father) that catapulted her from a hardscrabble life into a world of leisure.
Visit the Nation to read the review in full.
