Book Club

We’re moving away (briefly!) from fiction for our next book club pick – Clair Wills’ Missing Persons, Or My Grandmothers Secrets (2024). Clair Wills grew up in London and spent many idyllic family holidays in Cork with her grandmother, aunts and cousins. But in Missing Persons she approaches this family history through the ‘missing person’ at the heart of the book, her cousin, Mary, who was born in a mother and baby home, and who she never met. In her attempt to find out what happened to Mary, Wills tells a story about twentieth century Ireland, about land, about women, about shame, about families, and about emigration. “The most representative thing about my family,” she writes, “was not the small farm, the nightly saying of the Rosary, or the close community of neighbours … but the fact that most of its members lived elsewhere. Perhaps this is the biggest Irish secret. The typical Irish family was not at home.”
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You may also like the following events from The Swedish-Irish Society:

• Next month, 7th September, 10:30 am, Walk, talk and lunch at Flatenbadet in Stockholm
• Next month, 7th September, 11:00 am, Phil ”s Fun Day in Malmö in Malmö
• Next month, 13th September, 12:00 am, The annual Swedish-Irish Society and Stockholm Gaels GAA Family Day in Stockholm