Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Anthony Delaney

'In this moving and revelatory book, Anthony Delaney gives a voice to women and men whose lives have been written out of history. At heart, Queer Georgians is about the triumph of love in adversity' Hallie Rubenhold 
 
‘A fascinating story, beautifully told . . . I was utterly enthralled from the first page to the last’ Tracy Borman 
 
‘Anthony Delaney is a superb public historian’ Dan Snow 
 
 
In this dazzling work of restorative history, Dr Anthony Delaney has traced the stories of people daring to challenge society's expectations, unearthing archives and court records to reveal the tragedies and the joys of queer life three centuries ago. From Mother Clap’s Holborn coffee house to the Ladies of Llangollen’s utopian homestead, Delaney breathes new life into the forgotten and offers radical new interpretations of celebrated figures such as Anne Lister and the Chevalier d'Éon. Queer Georgians is an invitation to view our shared history in a whole new light.

Queer Georgians

A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers

Judith Flanders

The Macdonald sisters -- Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the 19th century.

A Circle of Sisters

Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin

Jane Martinson

You May Never See Us Again is the definitive story of David and Frederick Barclay - commonly known as the Barclay brothers. Born poor, these enigmatic twins built one of the biggest fortunes in Britain together and spent six decades at the epicentre of British business, media and politics. Their empire, said to be worth &pound;7bn at its height, included Littlewoods, the Ritz, The Daily Telegraph and the channel island of Brecqhou. 
 
And yet despite their fortune and influence, the Barclays' desire for privacy meant that their story has remained largely unknown - until a very public family dispute pitched Barclay against Barclay in the High Court. 
 
Journalist Jane Martinson unravels the fascinating story of these once inseparable brothers. Through their lives she offers compelling insights into post-war Britain, from the conditions that enabled their way of doing business to thrive through to the tightly enmeshed webs of influence between capitalism, politics and the media that shape Britain today.

You May Never See Us Again

The Barclay Dynasty: A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession

Lindsey Fitzharris

In The Butchering Art, historian Lindsey Fitzharris recreates a critical turning point in the history of medicine, when Joseph Lister transformed surgery from a brutal, harrowing practice to the safe, vaunted profession we know today. 
 
Victorian operating theatres were known as 'gateways of death', Fitzharris reminds us, since half of those who underwent surgery didn't survive the experience. This was an era when a broken leg could lead to amputation, and surgeons were still known to ransack cemeteries to find cadavers. And in squalid, overcrowded hospitals, doctors remained baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. 
 
At a time when surgery couldn't have been more dangerous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: Joseph Lister, a young Quaker surgeon. By making the audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection - and could be treated with antiseptics - he changed the history of medicine forever. With a novelist's eye for detail, Fitzharris brilliantly conjures up the grisly world of Victorian surgery, revealing how one of Britain's greatest medical minds finally brought centuries of savagery, sawing and gangrene to an end.

The Butchering Art

Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

Sarah Burton

The little known story of the inseparable brother and sister, lights of the Romantic circle, privately haunted by madness 
 
Wordsworth thought that if there were such a thing as a good man, it would be Charles Lamb, while Hazlitt believed Mary Lambto be the only sensible woman he knew. The couple's literary reputation rested partly on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. And yet there was an unhappier side: Charles was an alcoholic and Mary, in an attack of insanity, stabbed their mother to death. 
 
This fascinating account reaches to the heart of early nineteenth century London, meeting its eccentrics and its literary giants. It also visits the city's darker corners, where poverty stalks rented rooms and madhouses conceal terrible abuse.

A Double Life

A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb

R F Foster

From 1970, things were changing in Ireland &ndash; the Celtic Tiger had finally woken, and the rules for everything from gender roles and religion to international relations were being entirely rewritten. 
 
Luck and the Irish examines how the country has weathered these last thirty years of change, and what these changes may mean in the long run. R. F. Foster also looks at how characters as diverse as Gerry Adams, Mary Robinson, Charles Haughey and Bob Geldof have contributed to Ireland&rsquo;s altered psyche, and uncovers some of the scandals, corruption and marketing masterminds that have transformed Ireland &ndash; and its luck.

Luck and the Irish

A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000

Caelainn Hogan

Until alarmingly recently, the Catholic Church, acting in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of 'fallen women'. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted - sometimes illegally. 
 
Mortality rates in these institutions were shockingly high, and the discovery of a mass infant grave at the mother-and-baby home in Tuam made news all over the world. The Irish state has commissioned investigations. But the workings of the institutions and of the culture that underpinned it - a shame-industrial complex - have long been cloaked in secrecy and silence. For countless people, a search for answers continues. 
 
Caelainn Hogan - a brilliant young journalist, born in an Ireland that was only just starting to free itself from the worst excesses of Catholic morality - has been talking to the survivors of the institutions, to members of the religious orders that ran them, and to priests and bishops. She has visited the sites of the institutions, and studied Church and state documents that have much to reveal about how they operated. Reporting and writing with great curiosity, tenacity and insight, she has produced a startling and often moving account of how an entire society colluded in this repressive system, and of the damage done to survivors and their families. In the great tradition of Anna Funder's Stasiland and Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea - both winners of the Samuel Johnson Prize - Republic of Shame is an astounding portrait of a deeply bizarre culture of control.

Republic of Shame

How Ireland Punished ‘Fallen Women’ and Their Children

Stories from Ireland's Institutions for 'Fallen Women'

Thomas Penn

It is 1461 and England is crippled by civil war. One freezing morning, a teenage boy wins a battle in the Welsh marches, and claims the crown. He is Edward IV, first king of the usurping house of York... 
 
 Thomas Penn's brilliant new telling of the wars of the roses takes us inside a conflict that fractured the nation for more than three decades. During this time, the house of York came to dominate England. At its heart were three charismatic brothers - Edward, George and Richard - who became the figureheads of a spectacular ruling dynasty. Together, they looked invincible.. 
 
 But with Edward's ascendancy the brothers began to turn on one another, unleashing a catastrophic chain of rebellion, vendetta, fratricide, usurpation and regicide. The brutal end came at Bosworth Field in 1485, with the death of the youngest, then Richard III, at the hands of a new usurper, Henry Tudor. 
 
 The story of a warring family unable to sustain its influence and power, The Brothers York brings to life a dynasty that could have been as magnificent as the Tudors. Its tragedy was that, in the space of one generation, it destroyed itself.

The Brothers York

An English Tragedy

Thomas Cogswell

James's reign marked one of the very rare major breaks in England's monarchy. Already James VI of Scotland and a highly experienced ruler who had established his authority over the Scottish Kirk, he marched south on Elizabeth I's death to become James I of England and Ireland, uniting the British Isles for the first time and founding the Stuart dynasty which would, with several lurches, reign for over a century. Indeed his descendant still occupies the throne. 
 
A complex, curious man and great survivor, James drastically changed court life in London and presided over such major projects as the Authorized Version of the Bible and the establishment of English settlements in Virginia, Massachusetts, Gujarat and the Caribbean. Although he failed to unite England and Scotland, he insisted that ambassadors acknowledge him as King of Great Britain and that vessels from both countries display a version of the current Union Flag. 
 
He was often accused of being too informal and insufficiently regal - but when his son, Charles I, decided to redress these criticisms in his own reign he was destroyed. How much of the roots of this disaster were to be found in James's reign is one of the many problems dramatized in Thomas Cogswell's brilliant and highly entertaining new book.

James I (Penguin Monarchs)

The Phoenix King

Helen Castor

Richard of Bordeaux and Henry Bolingbroke were first cousins, born just three months apart. Their lives were from the beginning entwined. When they were still children, Richard was crowned King Richard II with Henry at his side: a ten-year-old lord in the service of his ten-year-old king. Yet they soon grew up to be opposites: Richard was the white hart, a thin-skinned narcissist, and Henry the eagle, a chivalric hero, a leader who inspired loyalty where Richard inspired only fear. Increasingly threatened by his charismatic cousin, Richard became consumed by the need for total power, and the stage was set for a final confrontation. This is a story about a nation brought to the brink of catastrophe – and two men whose lives were played out in parallel, to devastating effect.

The Eagle and the Hart

The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

Joanne Paul

Was the House of Dudley out to steal the throne? 
 
This was the question on the mind of Elizabeth I's courtiers when a forbidden book accused generations of the Dudley family of poisonings, plottings, murders, treason, incitement and other 'evil stratagems.' 
 
For decades, the Dudleys had been close to the throne, rising from nobodies to the land's highest offices. Under Henrys VII and VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and, finally, Elizabeth, they risked execution and imprisonment as they audaciously stole, murdered and swindled in the name of the monarch. 
 
But were they loyally protecting the crown, or did they secretly covet it for themselves?

The House of Dudley

A New History of Tudor England. A TIMES Book of the Year 2022

Alison Light

Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. 
 
Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were - but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us and what we owe them.

Common People

The History of An English Family

Liam O’Callaghan

Liam O'Callaghan's revelatory Blood and Thunder shows that the rise of Irish rugby is inextricable from the tensions, debates and divisions – of politics, religion and class – that have defined modern Irish history. 
 
Despite the political partition of the island, Ireland competes at rugby internationally with an all-island team – and with a bespoke anthem that nobody loves but everyone tolerates. Ireland has become a leading rugby nation despite its tiny population and the fact that the sport is only the fourth most popular team game on the island by participation. 
 
In Blood and Thunder, O’Callaghan traces the dramatic evolution whereby a rugby nation that was deeply attached to amateurism has made such a dramatic success of professionalism. From the sequence of events that led Ireland's private Catholic secondary schools to embrace rugby, to the controversies and crises that have shaken Irish rugby – including the Northern Troubles, the Belfast rape trial, and the rising toll of head injuries – Blood and Thunder tells the rich and fascinating story of Irish rugby. 
 
Blood and Thunder is more than a social and political history of Irish rugby. It is also a shadow-history of modern Ireland, rooted in brilliant original research and packed with terrific stories.

Blood And Thunder

Rugby and Irish Life: A History

Andrew Wheatcroft

The Habsburgs have been described at one extreme as demons &ndash; responsible for a &lsquo;long history of atrocities&rsquo;; and, at the other, as dodos &ndash; living fossils unable to adapt to the modern world. In reality, the flamboyant royal family appear, in many ways, to have behaved much like most other monarchies. Their story, however, is none the less enthralling for that. It is populated by such unforgettable figures as mad Queen Juana, progressing through Spain with her husband&rsquo;s decaying body; the &lsquo;heroically fertile&rsquo; Maria Theresa, and the quixotic Maximilian, &lsquo;Emperor&rsquo; of Mexico.

The Habsburgs

Embodying Empire

Richard Rhodes James

Part of the SECOND WORLD WAR VOICES series in partnership with the podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk, presented by comedian Al Murray and bestselling historian James Holland. 
 
'Heroic, punishing excursions behind enemy lines, the Chindit expeditions are mythical and controversial in equal measure...Rhodes James takes us right to the heart of them' Al Murray 
__________________________________ 
1943 - The fight to retake Burma is about to begin. Major-General Orde Wingate surprises the conquering Japanese Army with a daring raid they had no idea was coming. But this is just the beginning. 
 
Next, he devises a campaign of guerrilla operation to hit the invaders where it most hurts. Behind their own lines. Marshalling and training a lethal force of 10,000 men deep in the Burmese jungle, the Chindits are born. 
 
Cipher Officer Richard Rhodes James was part of that hidden army and chronicles the story of a band of brothers fighting for survival against a remorseless enemy and an unforgiving environment. Neither took any prisoners. The Chindits' daring actions and tactical brilliance laid the foundations for turning the tide of the war in the East.

Chindit

The inside story of one of World War Two's most dramatic behind-the-lines operations

John Davies

Yn ymestyn o'r Oesoedd Iâ hyd y dwthwn hwn, mae'r gyfrol feistrolgar hon yn olrhain hanes gwleidyddol, cymdeithasol a diwylliannol y rhan honno o'r byd y daethpwyd i'w hadnabod fel Cymru. Dyma'r llyfr sy'n egluro pam, 'er gwaethaf pawb a phopeth, 'rydym yma o hyd'. 
Yn yr astudiaeth ddiffiniol hon o hanes Cymru, trafodir bryn gaerau cynhanesyddol, olion Rhufeinig, gorchestion a methiannau tywysogion yr Oesoedd Canol, y Diwygiad Protestannaidd, datblygiad Anghydffurfiaeth, y Chwyldro Diwydiannol, twf yr ymdeimlad cenedlaethol, streiciau'r glowyr a'r ymgyrch i ennill ymreolaeth. Yn yr argraffiad newydd hwn, y mae'r stori yn cyrraedd y cyfnod newydd sydd wedi deillio o sefydlu'r Cynulliad Cenedlaethol.

Hanes Cymru (A History of Wales in Welsh)

Each of Foster's books has generated vigorous discussion, but in THE IRISH STORY he breaks fresh ground even by his own standards. Driven by his sense of the seriousness of history and a fascination with those who distort it, THE IRISH STORY examines how key facets of Ireland's past have been tampered with to serve a multiplicity of purposes. 
 
THE IRISH STORY is endlessly varied, surprising and funny. It is also a rallying cry for those anxious that contemporary Ireland may be in danger ofturning itself into a meretricious historical theme-park.

The Irish Story

Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland

Dr Gillian O'Brien

The Irish Times Top 10 Bestseller! 
 
From war to revolution, famine to emigration, The Darkness Echoing travels around Ireland bringing its dark past to life 
 
It's no secret that the Irish are obsessed with misery, suffering and death. And no wonder, for there is darkness everywhere you look: in cemeteries and castles, monuments and museums, stories and songs. 
 
 In The Darkness Echoing, Gillian O'Brien tours Ireland's most deliciously dark heritage sites, delving into the stories behind them and asking what they reveal about the Irish. 
 
Energetic, illuminating and surprisingly funny, The Darkness Echoing challenges old, accepted narratives about Ireland, and asks intriguing questions about Ireland's past, present and future. 
 
'My history book of the year' Ryan Tubridy 
 
'As thought-provoking as it is informative and entertaining' Irish Times 
 
'Hugely enjoyable, thought-provoking and informative ... An essential read' History Ireland

The Darkness Echoing

Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion

Claire Harman

Raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors, watching five beloved siblings sicken and die, haunted by unrequited love: Charlotte Brontë's life has all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. 
 
Charlotte was a literary visionary, a feminist trailblazer and the driving force behind the whole Brontë family. She pushed Emily to publish Wuthering Heights and took charge of their precarious finances when her feckless brother turned to opium. In Jane Eyre she introduced the world to a brand new kind of heroine, modelled on herself: quiet but fiercely intelligent, burning with passion and potential. 
 
This is a truly gripping and illuminating account of one of our best-loved novelists.

Charlotte Brontë

A Life

Alison Bashford

In his early twenties, poor, depressed, stranded in the Coral Sea on the HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of the great intellectual and scientific dynasties of their age. 
 
The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves, as individuals and as a species. They worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and above all, as public lecturers, educators and explainers. 
 
Their speciality was evolution in all its forms. But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Alison Bashford's engaging and original book interweaves the Huxleys' momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe - for better or worse - to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women.

An Intimate History of Evolution

The Story of the Huxley Family

Ian Kehoe

Gavin Daly

A few years ago, Sean Quinn was ranked among the two hundred richest people in the world, with a personal fortune of some $6 billion. Today he is bust, and his businesses have been taken from him. His efforts to keep his assets from his creditors have seen him sent to jail for contempt of court. He and his family remain embroiled in one of the biggest and most dramatic legal battles in Irish history. 
 
How did it all happen? In Citizen Quinn, Ian Kehoe and Gavin Daly tell the most extraordinary single story of the Irish crash.

Citizen Quinn

Mick Clifford

October 1971. Nineteen-year-old Una Lynskey vanishes near her home in Co. Meath. In the weeks that follow, and on flimsy grounds, gardaí identify three young local men as suspects. Within days of her body being found, one of the three is beaten to death by members of Una&rsquo;s family. 
 
The entire sequence of events is a tragedy in a quiet rural community - the wrong men jailed, no one ever facing justice - and becomes one of the most notorious failures in Irish policing and judicial history.In Who Killed Una Lynskey?, award-winning journalist Mick Clifford has built a compelling portrait of the case from interviews with the surviving main players, as well as exclusive access to the files of a private investigator who uncovered information the gardaí missed - or ignored. 
 
A timely, humane and compulsive read, this is a ground-breaking account of the botched investigation and its devastating consequences for not just four devastated families, but also the reputation of the gardaí.

Who Killed Una Lynskey?

A True Story of Murder, Vigilante Justice and the Garda ‘Heavy Gang’

Sean O'Driscoll

She grew up in a Chelsea townhouse and on a Devon estate. She was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace as a debutante in 1958. She trained at Oxford as an academic economist and had a love affair with a female professor (who was on the rebound from Iris Murdoch). At thirty, she commenced giving her inheritance away to the poor. 
 
In 1972, the deadliest year of the Northern Irish Troubles, she travelled to Ireland and joined the IRA. 
 
Sean O'Driscoll's Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber tells the astonishing story of Rose Dugdale, who went on to become a committed terrorist, participating in a major art heist and a bombing raid on a police and army barracks; who kept a pregnancy secret for nine months in prison and gave birth there; and who ended up at the heart of the IRA's bomb-making operation during its deadly final spasms in the 1990s. Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber is both the page-turning biography of a remarkable woman and a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of a terrorist organization.

Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber

The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale

Majella Kelly

In 2017, the presence of a mass grave was confirmed in a disused sewage system in Tuam, County Galway. In it were the bodies of infants - wards of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, where from 1925 to 1961 the children of unmarried women were sent to live their lives in the care of nuns. Their deaths were the result of a culture which, under the influence of the Church, took a prurient interest in women's private lives and bodies. 
 
In The Speculations of Country People, her hauntingly lyrical debut collection, Majella Kelly reckons with that legacy. She traces the journeys of women in our own day, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening and new happiness. The speculations of the title are in part those of gossip, the chatter of small communities everywhere; but they are also those of a local, very Irish mythos, in which pagan and Christian - and truth and legend - blend and blur. 
 
Here, then, are hares and selkies, a seductive 'master otter' of 'fabulous elegance' who might carry a woman away in the night; here is the last man on Omey Island; here a retired stuntman, dragging his bed of rusty nails along the beach. And here - quiet, against the beauty and loneliness of the Connemara landscape - are the little bones that wash up on shores or stick from the earth to speak of what has been.

The Speculations of Country People

Rene Weis

In the 13th century, a group of heretics in southwest France, the Cathars, became a serious threat to the Catholic church. In several waves of repression, thousands of Cathars were killed. Yet so ardent was their faith that, early in the next century, the Cathars rose one last time. Using the breathtakingly detailed and uniquely extant documentation from this period, and drawing on his intimate knowledge of the last Cathars' tracks and hiding places, many of which survive to this day, Ren&eacute; Weis tells the full story of this gripping historical episode.

The Yellow Cross

The Story of the Last Cathars 1290-1329

Jane Robinson

Only a generation or two ago, illegitimacy was one of the most shameful things that could happen in a family. 
 
In the Family Way tells secrets kept for entire lifetimes: long-silent voices from the workhouse, the Magdalene Laundry or the distant mother-and-baby home. Anonymous childhoods are recalled, spent in the care of Dr Barnardo or a Child Migration scheme halfway across the world. 
 
There are sorrowful stories in this book, but it is also about hope: about supportive families who welcomed 'love-children' home, or those who were parted and are now reconciled. Most of all, In the Family Way is about finally telling the truth.

In the Family Way

Illegitimacy Between the Great War and the Swinging Sixties

Tristram Hunt

Almost a quarter of a million lives were lost as King and Parliament battled for their religious and political ideals in the English Civil War. England was divided between Cavaliers and Roundheads engaged in bitter struggles from Preston to Lostwithiel, Pembroke to York. Armies were on the march, villages were decimated and great dynasties destroyed: fathers and sons, uncles and cousins were pitted against each other in defence of their loyalties. The civil war led to the execution of a king, the beginnings of sectarian division in Ireland, savage clan warfare in Scotland and the roots of English socialism. 
 
Tristram Hunt avoids adding to the many, mostly transitory interpretations of the civil war and instead offers a timeless narrative based on the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed these traumatic events. In doing so he brings out the voices of the civil war generation - those who lost sons, who witnessed massacres and who fought for an ideal. In this book we see their motivations, fears and misery as the horror of war overwhelmed them. From Cromwell's letters to the memoirs of a Roundhead wife the civil war era is brought to life in all its terrible and fascinating glory.

The English Civil War At First Hand

Antony Beevor

Olga Chekhova was the niece of Anton Chekhov, a stunning Russian beauty and a famous Nazi-era film actress who Hitler counted among his friends. After fleeing Bolshevik Moscow for Berlin in 1920, she was recruited by her composer brother Lev, to work for Soviet intelligence. In return, her family were allowed to join her. 
 
The extraordinary story of how the whole family survived the Russian Revolution, the civil war, the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist Terror, and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union is a breathtaking tale of compromise and survival in a merciless age. 
 
In Antony Beevor's spellbinding narrative, this single story paints a vivid picture of an extraordinary era.

The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

A Life Torn Apart By Revolution And War

The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war

David Womersley

'James was a king tragically trapped by principle. Yet was it wise to attempt to change the national religion?' 
 
The short reign of James II is generally seen as one of the most catastrophic in British history, ending in his exile after he unsuccessfully tried to convert England to Catholicism, a crisis that would haunt the monarchy for generations. Ultimately, David Womersley's biography shows, James was a man whose blindness to subtlety and political reality brought about his ruinous downfall.

James II (Penguin Monarchs)

The Last Catholic King

Clair Wills

How far would you go for the missing? 
 
When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence. 
 
How could a whole family - a whole country - abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? 
 
To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child. 
 
There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence - stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

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