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Clair Wills is a critic and cultural historian. She is the author of Lovers and Strangers- An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, which won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, That Neutral Island- A History of Ireland During the Second World War, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, Dublin 1916, The Best Are Leaving, and most recently The Family Plot- Three Pieces on Containment. Wills is the regius professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge.
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
