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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.
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 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 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
