Missing persons Or, my grandmother's secrets

In rural Ireland in the 1950s, author Wills' uncle got a teenage girl pregnant. His mother considered the girl unsuitable, and so she was sent to a mother and baby home to have the baby in institutional secrecy. The child grew up entirely separated from Wills' family, and she died before Wills even knew that she had existed. Wills (That Neutral Island, 2007) grapples with what little she knows of this cousin, endeavoring to situate this story of loss and cruelty within the broader context of the famine, rebellions, and religious development that defined nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. Recognizing the unlikeliness of discovering solid new facts about her family history, Wills instead performs a kind of delicate archaeology on the very concepts of familial and historical knowledge. She tugs at the fragile threads of government documents falsified and truthful, lies intended and not intended to be believed, and stories that change from teller to teller and listener to listener. Frank, self-aware, and deeply moving, Missing Persons draws attentions to what (and who) gets forgotten and left out of history.

Wills (Lovers and Strangers), a professor of English literature at Cambridge University, excavates her own family's secrets in this intimate and probing history of Irish mother-and-baby homes, Catholic institutions where unwed women and girls were sent to deliver babies throughout the 20th century. Beginning her research in the wake of the international outcry over the 2013 discovery of 800 bodies of babies and children in an unused septic tank on the grounds of a former mother-and-baby home in West Ireland, Wills seeks to understand how so many women and children could have gone "missing"--not just sent away, but "disremembered" by their communities. Eventually, the search leads to her discovery of an erased lineage within her own family. An uncle impregnated a neighbor, who was deemed ineligible for marriage due to disability, and was sent to a mother-and-baby home, where she gave birth to a daughter. Afterward, the mother moved to Cork, far away from her family; the child, who was never adopted, grew up at the home and later died by suicide; and the uncle left for England, never to return. Driven onward by a sense of indignation, Wills's narrative voice is wounded ("How could it have been worth it?") and her conclusions heartbreaking. It's a devastating reckoning with cruelty and conformity. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

An excavation of a familial cover-up illuminates broader mysteries of 20th-century Ireland. In her 20s, Wills, a professor of English at Cambridge and the author of Lovers and Strangers and That Neutral Island, learned she had a cousin she didn't know existed. The book begins with a cast of characters, all of whom are relatives of the author, divided into four temporal categories: the Victorians, which include Wills' grandmother; the post-revolutionary generation; the postwar generation, which includes the author; and the next generation. "I keep returning to a story of a generation gone wrong in my own family," she writes, "a mother not married, and a child stifled." In the 1950s, the author's uncle fathered a daughter (the aforementioned cousin) with his lover and, with the mother's knowledge, abandoned both to a "mother-and-baby home." Between 1922 and 1998, these institutions homed at least 56,000 unwed mothers and even more infants. In 2014, nearly 800 of their bodies were found in sewer chambers, which sparked a massive investigation into the inhumane conditions. "They did not survive, yet they have not gone away," writes Wills about the mistreated mothers and children. The author describes her family's story within this larger context: "To us, now, it seems pretty much unthinkable, yet the distance between us and the people who believed in the system (or believed enough) is very small." Wills explores the specific ways in which inherited past lives on, offering a searing yet nuanced investigation into the lives of complicit relatives, such as her mother, as well as tender portraits of those affected. The author's prose is stellar; her cadence complements this compelling tale, which grew increasingly complex over years of meticulous research. Ultimately, she emphasizes that "everything I've been describing was not out of the ordinary." Fascinatingly, viscerally haunting. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.