Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets

Critics Review

• 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

• If the past is a mass of tangled wool, Clair Wills frees a long strand and knits it into clarity, line by line, inviting the reader to see the complexity of the pattern she reveals. Written with elegance and erudition, Missing Persons is an extraordinary, moving achievement.

  Doireann Ní Ghríofa

• Clair Wills retrieves from time’s abyss a speculative history of universal import. This is a penetrating and affecting study, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the profound contradictions, the secrets and lies that define post-famine Ireland.

  Paul Lynch

• Clair Wills has written a book of unusual subtlety and power. Part memoir and social history, part familial detective story, it’s a work that lays bare the strength and terrible frailty of the bonds that are supposed to bind us together. A superb work of narrative nonfiction.

  Francisco Garcia

• A deeply absorbing account, related with compassion in elegant prose, of how a family’s past becomes embedded in its present.

  Danielle McLaughlin

• This is a brilliant, poignant, discomforting book but one that has the beauty of honesty and the ultimate restorative kindness that truth-telling offers. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex typology and legacy of family secrets.

  Katherine O'Donnell

• In this powerful memoir, Wills manages to excavate the truth about silence. Her vision as a historian reaches for the central question, why and how Irish people kept such dark secrets. How a nation of storytellers became so good at keeping violence concealed from themselves. How the information was kept, manipulated, disremembered under layers of talk into a vast store of collective forgetting. This is not only the story of Ireland in the past, but who we all are and what we have become.

  Hugo Hamilton