Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search

Martin Sixsmith

Nov 2013 · Recorded Books · Narrated by John Curless

About this audiobook

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Judi Dench: the heartbreaking true story of an Irishwoman and the secret she kept for 50 years 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 exposE 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 separatio

About the author

Martin Sixsmith was educated at Oxford, Harvard and the Sorbonne. From 1980 to 1997, he was the BBC correspondent in Moscow, Washington, Brussels and Warsaw. From 1997 to 2002, he worked as the director of communications and press secretary for Harriet Harman, Alistair Darling, and Stephen Byers. He is the author of two novels, Spin and I Heard Lenin Laugh. His non-fiction work, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, is the basis for the film Philomena starring Steve Coogan and Judi Dench.