Verso

Mother Country

Memoir of an Adopted Boy

by Jeremy Harding

-1

Paperback

$17.95

224 pages / November 2010 / 9781844676576

Not in stock

A revelatory true story about adoption, secrets 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 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.

Reviews

“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

“Stunning.”

– Boston Globe

“Beautifully written, funny and sad, this book is simply captivating.”

– Cressida Connolly, Daily Telegraph

“Fluid and invigorating ... a delicate and absorbing account of Harding's investigation into the circumstances of his adoption.”

– John Palattella, Nation

“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

“An able, imaginative work of kinship and family.”

– Kirkus

“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