{"title":"Clair Wills","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"lovers-and-strangers-book-clair-wills-9780141974972","title":"Lovers and Strangers","description":"SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018   TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017  'Generous and empathetic ... opens up postwar migration in all its richness' Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian  'Groundbreaking, sophisticated, original, open-minded ... essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today' Piers Brendon, Literary Review  'Lyrical, full of wise and original observations' David Goodhart, The Times  The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers - to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world and with many motives, thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country.  Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience. She introduces us to lovers, scroungers, dancers, homeowners, teachers, drinkers, carers and many more to show the opportunities and excitement as much as the humiliation and poverty that could be part of the new arrivals' experience. Irish, Bengalis, West Indians, Poles, Maltese, Punjabis and Cypriots battled to fit into an often shocked Britain and, to their own surprise, found themselves making permanent homes. As Britain picked itself up again in the 1950s migrants set about changing life in their own image, through music, clothing, food, religion, but also fighting racism and casual and not so casual violence.  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Few authors display such mastery of the language, form and measure of poetry, while at the same time opening poetry up to all the contemporary forces of disorder, contingency and confusion. But for this very reason, Muldoon’s is a complex and demanding body of work. Clair Wills's study, which covers the first 25 years of Muldoon's poetic output, is written both for the general poetry reader as well as those with a professional interest in poetry. In this highly readable book, Clair Wills takes the measure of Muldoon’s poetic gifts. She offers close readings of many of the major poems, while also assessing the general features of his unmistakeable style, and his relation to ] this is a repetitive device beyond anything which an attentive reader of the individual poem could be expected to grasp.?cant predecessors such as Robert Frost and Seamus Heaney. Her book also highlights the major themes in Muldoon’s poetry, such as autobiography and the question of origins, sexuality, Irish myth and legend, history and political violence in Northern Ireland, and the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters. Clair Wills tracks Muldoon’s poetic development, exploring the key concerns of each of his books, from New Weather (1973) to Hay (1998). Concluding with an evaluation of Muldoon’s then most recent collection, Hay, her study will be an essential reference point for discussions of this important poet. Her chapter on Hay was the first critical essay to note that Muldoon's long poem ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’ in Hay not only rhymes with two other long poems in that collection, ‘The Mud Room’ and ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, but also that these poems in turn \"rhyme\" with the two long poems in Muldoon's previous collection, Annals of Chile (1994), ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Incantata’: 'Each poem uses the same ninety rhyme words, and in the same order as they ?rst occur in ‘Yarrow’, but in different verse forms, so that the repetition is undetectable unless you are looking for it. 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When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby Home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence.  How could a whole family - a whole country - abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history?  To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child.  There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence - stories, secrets, silences. 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Sean O'Faolain, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O'Brien and Louis MacNeice are a few of the writers whose stories, letters and diaries are used to illuminate this small country as it lived under rationing, heavy censorship, the threat of invasion and a strange state of detachment from the real world of the war.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49539028910353,"sku":"GOR003018658","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49578630545681,"sku":"GOR013677373","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50340209099025,"sku":"GOR004088960","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51214703198481,"sku":"GOR010166707","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/057122105X.jpg?v=1751167753"},{"product_id":"dublin-1916-book-clair-wills-9781846680533","title":"Dublin 1916","description":"Taken over by the Irish Volunteers on Easter Monday 1916 and held for nearly a week, the rebels finally surrendered the GPO to the Crown forces after heavy gun bombardment, and the ensuing conflagration reduced it to an empty shell and destroyed much of the centre of the city.  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She unearths the motivations of those thousands who left the country to fight in the British forces. And she shows how ordinary people tried to make sense of the Nazi threat through the lens of antagonism to Britain, the former colonial power.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49593210372369,"sku":"GOR003678969","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49783516463377,"sku":"GOR002701830","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50479080309009,"sku":"GOR011066660","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}]},{"product_id":"dublin-1916-book-clair-wills-9781846680618","title":"Dublin 1916","description":"It was taken over by the Irish Volunteers on Easter Monday 1916 and held for nearly a week. 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It has stood for sacrifice and treachery, national unity and divisive violence, for the future and the past.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49598549524753,"sku":"GOR002054041","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50401713619217,"sku":"CIN1846680611G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51256891146513,"sku":"GOR005892134","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1846680611.jpg?v=1750898991"},{"product_id":"lovers-and-strangers-book-clair-wills-9781846147166","title":"Lovers and Strangers","description":"SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018   TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017  'Generous and empathetic ... opens up postwar migration in all its richness' Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian  'Groundbreaking, sophisticated, original, open-minded ... essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today' Piers Brendon, Literary Review  'Lyrical, full of wise and original observations' David Goodhart, The Times  The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers - to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world and with many motives, thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country.  Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience. She introduces us to lovers, scroungers, dancers, homeowners, teachers, drinkers, carers and many more to show the opportunities and excitement as much as the humiliation and poverty that could be part of the new arrivals' experience. Irish, Bengalis, West Indians, Poles, Maltese, Punjabis and Cypriots battled to fit into an often shocked Britain and, to their own surprise, found themselves making permanent homes. As Britain picked itself up again in the 1950s migrants set about changing life in their own image, through music, clothing, food, religion, but also fighting racism and casual and not so casual violence.  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By week’s end, the rebels had surrendered, and the siege had left the once magnificent GPO an empty shell—and turned it into the most famous and deeply symbolic building in all of Ireland.  This book unravels the events in and around the GPO during the Easter Rising of 1916. Drawing on participant and eyewitness accounts, diaries, and newspaper reports, Clair Wills recreates the harrowing moments that transformed the GPO from an emblem of nineteenth-century British power and civil government, to an embattled barricade, and finally to a national symbol. What was it like to be trapped in the building? To watch, and listen to, the destruction of the city?  Was the act meant as a bloody sacrifice or a military coup d’état? Exploring these questions as they were experienced and understood then and later, her book reveals the twists and turns that the myth of the GPO has undergone in the last century, as it has stood for sacrifice and treachery, national unity and divisive violence, the future and the past.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50229405188369,"sku":"CIN0674036336VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674036336.jpg?v=1750944671"},{"product_id":"missing-persons-book-clair-wills-9780374611866","title":"Missing Persons","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow far would you go for the missing?\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir, and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about memory, loss, motherhood, and emigration. She traces a history of sexual secrecy through four generations of unplanned pregnancies in her own family, stretching from the 1890s to the 1980s and from the West of Ireland to Massachusetts, London, and the English countryside, dramatizing the power of secret-keeping as a form of care, but also as a form of violence and exclusion.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e At the heart of her search is a cousin who went missing from her own family, born in a mother-and-baby home in the 1950s, and brought up in an institution. Wills asks not only what happened, but why? Why did families consent to the institutional care and control of unmarried mothers and their children? Why did the system make sense to ordinary families, and how can we make sense of it now? 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She traces a history of sexual secrecy through four generations of unplanned pregnancies in her own family, stretching from the 1890s to the 1980s and from the West of Ireland to Massachusetts, London and the English countryside, dramatizing the power of secret-keeping as a form of care, particularly between women, but also as violence and exclusion.  At the heart of her search is a cousin who went missing from her own family, born in a Mother and Baby Home in the 1950s, and brought up in an institution.  Wills asks not only what happened, but why? Why did families consent to the institutional care and control of unmarried mothers and their children? Why did the system make sense to ordinary families, and how can we make sense of it now? What questions should we be asking about guilt, blame, and responsibility?  In order to uncover how people thought about illicit sex, illegitimacy, and institutions, Wills followed the tracks laid down in family stories and anecdotes. She interprets the gaps in stories – the missing bits—as places where the past was both preserved and disavowed.   We are all born into families, whether or not we are allowed to belong to them. Wills asks us to undertake a radical reshaping of our idea of the family, and of the history of generation. We are all part of the historical archive—the remembering and forgetting is in us, whether we like it or not.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51171940565265,"sku":"GOR014192001","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51232027607313,"sku":"GOR014203998","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51478849290513,"sku":"GOR014296940","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52110863302929,"sku":"NGR9781802063028","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52682815471889,"sku":"NLS9781802063028","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1802063021.jpg?v=1769683105"},{"product_id":"missing-persons-book-clair-wills-9781250371928","title":"Missing Persons","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNon-Fiction Book of the Year, Irish Book Awards 2024\u003cbr\u003e A \u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e Best Book of 2024\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eHow far would you go for the missing?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir, and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about memory, loss, motherhood, and emigration. 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