Elegant, erudite and undeniably powerful, Wills' searching family memoir traces the past of a cousin she never knew she had and the appalling conspiracy of silence about the treatment of unmarried mothers in postwar Ireland.
Waterstones Irish Book of the Month for February 2025
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.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781802063028
Number of pages: 208
Weight: 160 g
Dimensions: 199 x 131 x 13 mm
Missing Persons is as close to perfect as a memoir can be; the richness of its subject honed to a poised and discerning brevity, written in unexpectedly lambent prose. It is the sum of the author’s life: both the family history she carries with and within her, but also the four decades of research and analysis that have been her intellectual existence. Only she could have written it, but it will speak to and about the lives of many - Lucy Scholes, Financial Times
An expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist - John Banville, The Observer
The stories she uncovers are remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human… Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention. - Laura Hackett, The Sunday Times
She is deft at unpicking lies, evasions and gaps in the record, grasping that these things have political as well as private meaning… an act of fairly radical reframing - Olivia Laing, The Guardian
An affecting and enraging book, part memoir, part national history, about Wills’s attempt to uncover the truth about her family and the hundreds of others like it. - Pippa Bailey, New Statesman
Always compelling and deeply moving… an unforgettable account, in microcosm, of the world of Catholic Ireland in the 20th Century: the incarceration of the so-called sinful and the emigration of others, leaving a fragmented country of secrets, enigmas and buried guilt - Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mail on Sunday
Not just a vivid, compelling account of Clair’s family and ancestry, but an intriguing snapshot of Ireland’s social history… rigorously researched... empathetic - The Irish Independent
Among the most supple and illuminating explorers of the intertwined cultural histories of Ireland and Britain... a dark history of loss and forgetting - New York Review of Books
Utterly engaging, fearless and acute - Irish Times
In its account of one family's history of silence and secrecy, Clair Wills has written a compelling book which demonstrates the uncanny universality of even the most personal stories. Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present, this is a history shaken by intimacy - a brave and rigorously humane book - Seán Hewitt
You inherit your history through the stories you’re told, but also the ones you’re not. There’s hardly a family in Ireland who doesn’t have their own secrets about unmarried mothers or mother and baby homes, but this... More
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