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Mothers' Boys
  • Published: 1 July 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099478522
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

Mothers' Boys



'The story unfolds with striking authenticity and perception... sensitive and gripping' - Daily Telegraph

The attack on fifteen-year-old Joe Kennedy was particularly squalid and vicious. Sheila Armstrong's grandson Leo, usually a quiet, well-behaved boy, was found holding a knife. Harriet Kennedy cannot cope with her son's continuing pain; Sheila, who reared Leo, cannot bear the lasting guilt. In a powerful and moving tale of suffering and forgiveness, the two women confront the complex range of emotions that motherhood entails.

  • Published: 1 July 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099478522
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Margaret Forster

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster was the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want? , Keeping the World Away, Over and The Unknown Bridesmaid. She also wrote bestselling memoirs – Hidden Lives, Precious Lives and, most recently, My Life in Houses – and biographies. She was married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lived in London and the Lake District. She died in February 2016, just before her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, was published.

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Praise for Mothers' Boys

Margaret Forster has the gift of making you care deeply about what happens to her characters

Scotsman

This is Forster writing at her very best

Daily Mail

How does it feel to be the mother of a juvenile thug? Or the mother of that thug's hapless victim? It is the pain of such mothers that Margaret Forster explores most brilliantly in her dark, harrowing and extremely topical novel

Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

Forster is remarkably honest, skilful and perceptive

Observer

Margaret Forster has a remarkable gift for taking huge social issues and welding them into minutely observed human dramas that are perfect portraits of the way we live now...The story grips and the heart bleeds for these good mothers who are, like all mothers, never good enough

Polly Toynbee, Sunday Express