Thursday, January 27, 2011

4. Mother Country

By:  Jeremy Harding
Rated 4.5 Stars
From Library

This is a beautifully written memoir.

Publisher Summary

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 setout to look for traces of his birth mother, that he began to understand whohis adoptive mother really was—and the benign make-believe world she built for herself and her little boy. Evoking a magical childhood spent intransit 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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