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.
- ISBN10 1844676579
- ISBN13 9781844676576
- Publish Date 22 November 2010 (first published 6 April 2006)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 29 July 2022
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Verso Books
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 224
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781844676576