Philomena
Subtitle: a mother, her son, and a fifty-year search
By: Martin Sixsmith ; foreword by Dame Judi Dench
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 420
ISBN-13: 9780143126805
Copyright date: 2013
Subjects: Teenage mothers; Biography; Unmarried mothers; Illegitimate children; Lawyers; Politicians
Description: "When she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a 'fallen woman.' Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Philomena's son was trying to find her. Renamed Michael Hess, he had become a leading lawyer in the first Bush administration, and he struggled to hide secrets that would jeopardize his career in the Republican Party and endanger his quest to find his mother. A gripping exposâe told with novelistic intrigue, Philomena pulls back the curtain on the role of the Catholic Church in forced adoptions and on the love between a mother and son who endured a lifelong separation."--
Notes: "First published in Great Britain as The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2009."