Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search
    Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search
    Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search
    Audiobook15 hours

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

    Written by Martin Sixsmith

    Narrated by John Curless

    3.5/5

    ()

    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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 1, 2013
    ISBN9781470392253
    Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search
    Author

    Martin Sixsmith

    Martin Sixsmith studied Russian at Oxford, Harvard, the Sorbonne and in St Petersburg, and psychology at Birkbeck and London Metropolitan University. He witnessed the end of the Cold War first hand, reporting for the BBC from Moscow during the presidencies of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. He is the author of two novels and several works of non-fiction, including Philomena and Russia: A 1,000 Year Chronicle of the Wild East.

    Related to Philomena

    Related audiobooks

    European History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Havenfall

      Feb 26, 2020

      RELEASED 3 MARCH 304 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Sara Holland Publisher Bloomsbury Adolescence is hard enough at the best of times, but throw in a murdered brother, a mother on death row and a high school full of bullies that really don’t apprecia

      1 min read

    • Article

      It’s Not the Holocaust

      Jun 22, 2018

      It’s Not the Holocaust
      3 min read

    • Article

      Randy Weaver, Participant In Ruby Ridge Standoff, Dies At 74

      May 12, 2022

      A patriarch of a family that was involved in an 11-day Idaho standoff with federal agents 30 years ago has died.

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Minders

      Oct 7, 2020

      RELEASED OUT NOW! 448 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author John Marrs Publisher Del Rey John Marrs’s latest near future, high-concept techno-thriller isn’t so much a sequel to The One (DNA dating app has dark secret) and Passengers (autonomous ca

      1 min read

    • Article

      THE Total Girl BOOK CLUB

      May 10, 2020

      We received so many fantastic reviews! Introducing our first lucky winner: here’s what TG reader Sasha had to say about the new book by Jacqueline Harvey! Kensy and Max 5: Freefall. I thought the book was great. Jacqueline Harvey is such an amazing

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Millions Top Ten: July 2019

      Aug 8, 2019

      Benjamin Dreyer graduates to our Hall of Fame, making room for new Colson Whitehead, while Sally Rooney pulls off the extremely rare double listing. The post The Millions Top Ten: July 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      1 min read

    • Article

      In Both Fact And Fiction, The Truth Of Tulsa Is Hard To Stomach

      May 29, 2021

      When author Jewell Parker Rhodes tried to publish a novel retelling the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre, she found that not everyone was ready to reckon with the city's painful, traumatic history.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Pick Of The Crop: October’s 10 Best Books To Savor In Autumn

      Oct 20, 2021

      Spend the month reading new books by John le Carré, Jonathan Franzen, Amor Towles, and Mary Beard.

      2 min read

    • Article

      TV Pieces Of Her

      Mar 24, 2022

      TV Pieces Of Her
      1 min read

    • Article

      Ninth House

      Oct 9, 2019

      RELEASED OUT NOW! 450 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Leigh Bardugo Publisher Gollancz Fantasy writers were fascinated by schools and colleges long before Harry Potter caught the train to Hogwarts, and it’s fairly easy to draw up a list of th

      1 min read

    • Article

      Suffering In Silence, And Out Loud

      Feb 12, 2018

      LISA HALLIDAY’S DEBUT novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair—a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage. This romance is between Alice, a young woman in publishing, and Ezra Blazer, a literary éminence grise, who resembles a

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Philomena

    3.5/5

    126 ratings19 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Philomena Lee was just 18 years old when she gave birth to a son, Anthony, while confined in an Irish convent that did a brisk business in baby-selling to America. The nuns also ran a slave labor camp, requiring even the poorest of girls to work off their “debt” to the nuns, even though the convent was receiving funds from the Irish government to care for the girls. In the process, the girls were beaten, browbeaten and made to feel worthless. Christian charity, it’s called and I hope those nuns got the afterlife they deserved.From the title of the book, readers may be fooled into thinking the book is about Philomena Lee – it is in truth about her son -- how he was adopted and shipped to America, how he succeeded in his professional life, how he was scarred by his treatment. His and his mother’s treatment by the nuns made me angry and sad. It also showed the strength of the maternal bond. Philomena (titled The Lost Child of Philomena Lee when first published in Britain) is a wholly engaging story, simply told, and without a lot of lot of fluff or mawkishness. Just the facts, ma’am. Because Anthony Lee (later Michael Anthony Hess) wound up as chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, Philomena sheds light on that institution – a definite plus in my book. I definitely want to see the movie with Dame Judi Dench as Philomena.When I read about the book, I was unaware of the controversy surrounding it -- with some people who were characters in the book objecting to the characterization of Michael as a troubled soul and finding fault with the book's facts and made-up dialogue. I took the book at face value.
    • 3/5
      Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search by Martin Sixsmith; (4*)Always of interest, books about a mother and her child can touch the reader to their very core. This is one such story. It begins with Philomena's son, Anthony's early years in a convent in Ireland. He was in the convent because this particular convent took in unwed mothers, which his mother was, and put their children up for adoption to American families. It was heartrending to read of the two of them being separated.The separation of mother and son affected Anthony/Michael's life throughout. He suffered from depression and anxiety as he always wondered the circumstances of his being given up by his mother along with: 'Did she love me?' This was the constant in his life.The reader does, as Michael's birth mother did, get some answers though they may not be the ones we want.I found the book to be engaging, though not particularly well researched nor well written. It is based on something that really happened to this mother and son but it left me wondering just how much of it truly occurred.
    • 3/5
      Reading this was a weird experience. I was aware of the film made of the story, and broadly what it was about, but I haven’t seen the film and didn’t know how it played out. I knew it was based on a true story. This book has photo plates at two points with photos of the actual characters which felt like a bonus, and I deliberately didn’t look at any of them until I got to the pages where they were.Weird stuff: The book has Steve Coogan and Judi Dench (from the film) on the front cover, but while the novel is supposedly being narrated by the Coogan-character, the Judi Dench character isn’t really in it at all. Not at a time when she could reasonably have looked anything like Judi Dench. I don’t know why the book was called Philomena at all. I would have called it Mike. And then when I got to the second lot of photos, they delivered a spoiler of such enormity that to a reading-in-good-faith reader like me it was like being punched in the face. Presumably the people who put out this version of the novel arrogantly assumed that everyone would have already seen the film. Well I hadn’t.I finished the novel, grudgingly, feeling increasingly irritated by the plodding style and the lack of anything really happening other than a constant repetition of the same self-destructive spiral the main character was in. That’s often the thing with stories based on real life - people’s lives just don’t conform to the literary rules relating to the gradual build up of drama. Interesting to note that when I finally reached the end and googled the film, a lot of changes to the real life events were made. So this book is really aimed at people who liked the film and wanted to know the other - more factual - side. Good luck to them. All I came out with was a profound feeling of relief that I wasn’t brought up Catholic.
    • 3/5
      Loved the movie, the book wasn’t quite as good.
    • 4/5
      In 1952, Philomena Lee became pregnant our of wedlock in an Ireland where that just wasn't allowed to happen. She was sent to a convent to give birth to her baby, and would live there for three years, caring for her son and working in the convent's commercial laundry. At the end of that time, Philomena was forced to sign him over to the convent for adoption, and he was effectively sold to an American couple.

      She loved her beautiful, happy son, and despite being forced to sign him away and promise never to seek to find him, she made her first attempt less than a year later. Meanwhile, her son, now named Michael Hess, grew up in America, and wondered and worried why his birth mother had given him up.

      Michael experienced the hard version of some of the challenges of being adopted in the era of closed adoptions, but he was smart, handsome, hardworking, and kind. He grew up to be a lawyer, and a leading official in the first Bush administration.

      Philomena was torn by her desire to know what happened to her son on the one hand, and the insistence of the sisters that even talking about her baby born in sin was another sin. She became a nurse, married, and raised a family, but eventually started looking for her son again.

      We get Philomena's experiences up to the point of Michael's adoption, and then we go following his life in America, occasionally interspersed with Sixsmith's account of how he got involved in the search for him. We don't get back to Philomena's story until the end. I found this a bit frustrating; I would have preferred a more even dividing and alternation of their experiences, and frankly could have waiting for Sixsmith's story of how he became involved until Philomena's story reached that point.

      Despite that complaint, this is a well-researched, thoughtful, moving story, that reveals a dark side of Ireland and the Catholic Church in the 20th century, without demonizing either.

      Recommended.

      I bought this book.
    • 3/5
      The film very closely follows the mother's story Only from this book. That just happens to ignore the middle 80 percent of the book that follows the son's life in the States. I think the moviemakers were smart to focus on the rarely told story rather than the more usually written story of the boy progressing thru life to eventually die of AIDS.
    • 4/5
      The film based on this book focusses mostly on Philomena Lee and her search, but this book focusses much more on her son, his life and his search for his mother. A fascinating story and an important one since Michael Hess, the lost child of the title, struggled with his identity throughout his life.
    • 2/5
      Michael Hess is an adopted child . His adoptive American parents 'bought' him from an Irish convent. He is led to believe that his mother hilomena gave him away and this instills in him a sense of rejection that will never leave him. His search for his biological mother has no results and the story focuses mainly on his homosexuality and the professional and relational problems he has to deal with. So, if you are interested in what it was like to be gay under the Reagan and Bush administrations, you might like this book.
      But there's the snag. The title is highly misleading: this is not the story of Philomena. Her point of view is only seen in the first and last pages of the novel. Perhaps the movie is better.
    • 3/5
      This was very interesting at first when it was about how the unwed mothers in Ireland were treated by the Catholic Church. Heartbreaking. Then it transitioned to the story of the boy who had been adopted and his life in the United States and it was disappointing. Too many made up conversations, too much armchair analyzing, too little about the birth mother in Ireland.
    • 3/5
      For a book called Philomena, the title character occupies maybe a hundred pages. More a story about her son she gave up. Writing is up and down, from poor to acceptable. Perhaps being a true story the author couldn't liven up the prose.
    • 1/5
      I got to around page 200 and called it quits on this book. I adored the movie which was indeed about Philomena and her quest to find the child that was taken away from her and sold to an American couple which was the fate of the any unmarried lass in Ireland during the 1950's. The movie was so entertaining that I was thrilled to finally have the library track down a copy for me. The book was as far as I could tell was mainly about Mike, the son. I was put off mainly because the author seemed to take extreme liberties with explaining Mike's motivations, thoughts, dialog etc, etc, etc, and Mike is not around to either defend or define himself. Just did not enjoy it and tossed it aside
    • 5/5
      This book was the story of Michael Hess rather then Philomena and about her son Son Michael Hess being gay and his US government job. I was interested in the early part of the book but found it somewhat long. It is a companion to the movie, in that the movie is the (true) story of a woman (girl) who enters a Catholic convent during her pregnancy, gives birth, and her child is adopted out against her wishes, it shows the cruelty and bigotry from the Catholic church at the time
    • 3/5
      This book was the story of Michael Hess rather then Philomena and , therefore, surprised me as I was expecting her story. It was very interesting dwelt a great deal on Michael Hess being gay and his US government job. I was interested in the early part of the book but found it somewhat long.
    • 4/5
      I was inspired to pick up this book after seeing the movie back in February, and I'm so glad I read it. It's a harrowing and wonderful book. Heartbreaking to read about what the Catholic Church did to these women and children, frustrating (but also inspiring) to read about how one mother forgave them. Martin Sixsmith does an excellent job of pasting together what must have been many stories and testaments of varying degrees of intimacy and honesty. Interestingly, while the movie tells the story of Philomena and Martin Sixsmith's search and discovery, the book is really more the story of Anthony Lee/Michael Hess, Philomena's "lost child". Excellent to read and watch together. (And btw, it's just so much fun to say "Martin Sixsmith". Try it.)
    • 4/5
      Well done documentation of the process of finding Philomena's son's past. Managed to make all the historical documentation interesting when it could have been very dry. For once though, I prefer the movie which put the personality into it.
    • 5/5
      I found this book surprisingly more interesting than I thought I would. The title is misleading, though. Philomena was a young woman in Ireland who became pregnant out of wedlock and was placed in a convent to give birth. There she had her child, a son, who was then forcibly taken away from her with another little girl from that same convent, both to be adopted by a couple in the United States who already had three children of their own. This is really the story of Anthony Lee, raised as Michael Anthony Hess, by a distant controlling father and a meek mother. Michael's story of his family life, education, and personal life was as interesting as it was sad.Throughout the entire book, I always had the feeling that Michael was an individual whose life was a living lie. Nothing he ever accomplished, at least in this literary version of his life, was without anguish, pain, or fear. He was brilliant, but the turns of his life, especially the way the author describes Michael as a tormented gay man who rose to prominence within the legal department of the Republican party, were agonizing. By the end of the book, I was wrung out - from sadness and from the injustice of it all. -----------------------------P.S. Now that I wrote the above review based on how I perceived the book alone, I went back to read other reviews. There I found many reports of inaccuracies, falsehoods, omissions, and exaggerations in the story of Michael Hess. It would be nice if someone would come forward and write a more accurate biography of this interesting individual. I would like to read a corrected version.
    • 1/5
      As a person who was interviewed for this book and who appears as a “character” in it, I believe this book should be categorized as fiction. The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, written by Martin Sixsmith, was originally published in 2009. After the success of the movie Philomena, the book was reissued with a new title. By now, everyone knows that the book tells the tragic story of Philomena Lee, who had an illegitimate child in the early 1950s while living at an abbey run by nuns in Ireland. An American couple adopted her son, Anthony Lee, when he was 3 years old and renamed him Michael Hess. Philomena and Michael were stymied in their search to find each other by the nuns’ refusal to give them information.About 7 years ago, Michael’s partner (called Pete in the book) referred me to a journalist who was trying to pitch a book based on the story of Michael’s birth mother’s search for her son. Following Pete’s lead, I agreed to speak to Martin Sixsmith about my friendship with Michael. He recorded our 2-hour conversation. Pete expected to hear from Sixsmith if the book proposal ever came to fruition.When the book appeared without prior notice to Pete or me in 2009, I was appalled to find that Sixsmith had written a fictional version of Michael’s life in which characters engage in conversations that never happened. Because the book received consistently bad reviews in the British newspapers, I decided not to write a review, hoping that the book would fade from view. That is exactly what happened until Steve Coogan read the 2009 newspaper article by Sixsmith and the rest is history. I cringed when I read my “character” engaging in fictional dialogue with Michael. Things only went downhill from there. The dialogue that Sixsmith invented for the conversations Michael and I supposedly had were not quotes from the interview I gave, and I did not agree to my interview being turned into scenes with made-up dialogue. Michael is dead and cannot verify these conversations or, for that matter, any of the conversations he is purported to have had throughout the book.Inaccuracies abound. I met Michael when he hired me to work for him in December of 1977. The book has me engaging in fictional conversations during 1975 and 1976 with Michael about his boyfriend Mark, and even having conversations with Mark about Michael’s supposedly dark moods and behavior. I think the author created these events to support his premise that Michael was a troubled and tortured soul because he could not find his birth mother and because he was required to hide his sexuality at his place of work. This was the 1980s and there were very few gay men or woman who were “out” at work.The fiction continues. I did not discuss politics with Michael during this time period and never talked about supporting Carter. Also, Sixsmith has Michael moving in with me to “recover” from too much partying. Not true. The many purported conversations in which I provide advice to Michael about his love life or work problems simply did not occur. Like most good friends, I did a lot of listening and nodding. It is really difficult for those of us who knew Michael to see him portrayed so poorly. He was smart, charming, good looking and thoughtful. Michael always went out of his way to make his friends’ birthdays special. For 10 years, he took my daughter and me to many Christmas tree lots in search of the perfect tree.Michael was a great boss and mentor who taught me so much about legal research and writing and encouraged me to take on difficult and challenging assignments. He was a terrific writer and speaker. These talents and a lot of hard work contributed to his successful career.Pete and other friends have tried to correct Sixsmith’s depiction of Michael as a tortured soul in recent articles that appeared in The New York Times and Politico. They stress his long-term relationship with Pete and his multifaceted interests, which ranged from following Notre Dame sports to predicting the best new Broadway musicals to his prodigious gardening. Between the made-up dialogue and almost prurient focus on Michael’s sexual behavior, the author has failed to present anything near a recognizable picture of Michael Hess. While I can only speak definitively to the information that I gave Sixsmith and my knowledge of Michael, the book contains other conversations that can’t possibly be sourced because the people are dead. If you plan to read the book, be aware that you will be reading fiction and, not very well written fiction, at that.
    • 4/5
      As most of you probably know (due to publicity about the recent film based on Sixsmith's book), this is the true story of a young Irish woman sent a to convent to give birth, and of the son who was taken away from her at the age of three--sold, in effect, to an American couple. Fifty years later, Philomena reveals her secret to her family and launches a search for the long-lost son that she has always felt has been looking for her.In a New York Times interview about the film, Steve Coogan, who plays Sixsmith, says, "“We didn’t want to become overly involved in the life of Anthony Lee or Michael Hess. What appealed to me was the search for the son and the tragedy of not being able to see him grow up. That’s how Philomena experienced it; it was just out of reach, just beyond her.” This explains the main difference between the movie and the book, which focuses predominantly not on Philomena's search but on the successful but sad life of her son.Anthony Lee was just three when he was adopted, as an afterthought, by the sister of an American bishop and her husband. The family, who had three boys of their own, had always wanted a daughter, but medical problems prevented them from trying again for one of their own. When she met Mary at Sean Ross Abbey, Marge was struck by the affectionate, dark-haired little boy who hovered over her like a protective brother. And so the two were adopted together. Like all of the young mothers at the abbey, Philomena Lee was forced to sign papers giving up all rights to her son and agreeing never to attempt to find or contact him.It is the story of Anthony, renamed Michael Anthony Hess, that fills most of Sixsmith's pages: growing up in a strict Catholic family in the Midwest, trying to please an adoptive father who hadn't been too keen on his adoption in the first place and becoming an over-achiever as a result, struggling with his sexual identity, rising to a major post in the Reagan administration, and, always, being haunted by the memories of Ireland and the feeling that the mother he left behind was looking for him. Realizing the effect this loss has had on his life, especially on his ability to feel close to other people, Mike makes several visits to Sean Ross Abbey in hopes of learning more about his origins, but, following investigations into wrongdoing by the Irish government, the books are closed (or lost, transferred, or burned) forever.The final chapters return to Philomena's encounter with Sixsmith and their efforts to locate Anthony, a journey that comes to a bittersweet end.I have to agree with the LT reviewer who questioned the account of Michael Hess's emotions. Although Sixsmith did interview people who had known him well (including his sister Mary, former coworkers and lovers, and several friends), all of these people admit that Mike was a very private man who compartmentalized his life and rarely revealed anything personal to anyone. So while Sixsmith does a fine job of imagining what Mike may have been thinking or feeling, it came as rather a shock in the end to realize that the man himself had not been consulted in the writing of this book. It also made me suspect that Sixsmith was promoting an agenda beyond telling Philomena's story and advocating for more open adoption laws. But all this is in retrospect. Despite these concerns, Philomena is a moving and engaging story. Four stars here. I'm eager to see the movie version; although the emphasis shifts from Mike to his mother, that's to be expected when Judi Dench has been cast in the title role.
    • 4/5
      Aha, my first VG read of the New Year! This is a chilling extension of the Magdalene Laundries story. The protagonist asks for help from a reporter to find her son, who was sold fifty years prior from an Irish convent to an American family looking to adopt an Irish child. When unmarried Philomena gets pregnant in 1952, she is brought to the convent and abandoned by her family. She is allowed to care for her son Anthony for three years before he is stolen from her. Where and how Anthony ends up is completely startling and compelling. I wish that Philomena herself had been more fully realized, but that's a minor quibble in a non fiction that so completely immerses itself in a remarkable American life. Can't wait to see the movie!