Silver River: A Family Story - Hardcover

Goodwin, Daisy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002258307 ISBN 13: 9780002258302

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2007

Synopsis

What makes a woman leave her children? Sometimes you have to go back 150 years to find out…

Daisy Goodwin’s mother left home when Daisy was five and embarked upon a bohemian life in Swanage. Daisy was brought up by her respectable father and her meticulous German stepmother and adored her glamorous mother from afar. She made sense of her mother’s difference and of her absence through her imaginings about the family’s unstable South American history. It was only when Daisy underwent a deep depression following the birth of her own daughter, that she felt the weight of her mother’s abandonment and the burden of her family’s past take root in her own life.

Daisy’s family, on her mother’s side, is as eccentric and wayward as any family could be. Her Irish forebears – a Catholic and a Protestant – were driven from their southern Irish home and emigrated to Argentina. Their history there is one of vast wealth rapidly acquired and just as rapidly lost, of gambling, of horses, of suicides and breakdowns, of isolation in the bleak expanses of the Pampas and of the heights of high society. In this extraordinary memoir, the contrasts between Argentina and England serve as a metaphor for the clashes in the author’s life, caught between two parents, two countries and two cultures. Intensely personal, funny and unsentimental, ‘The Silver River’ explores universal questions about families, identity and growing up in a way that has never been done before.

About this title

About the Author

Daisy Goodwin is a television producer and writer. She is married with two children and lives in London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0002258307
• ISBN 13: 9780002258302
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 310