Showing results for "The Silence" in Dysfunctional Families

NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025, AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS The heart-breaking account of a search for the truth behind the brutal killings that shocked a nation. On 29 August 2016, devastating news hit the headlines that an entire family was found dead in a rural community. For Jacqueline...

Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband Wayne beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear - the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly.

In her stirring, vulnerable new memoir, Karena Dawn reveals what it was like to grow up with a mother suffering from severe mental health issues, and how, during her teenage years, she desperately tried to escape her own inner demons. Addicted to pain-numbing drugs and crippled by severe depression, Karena learned how to use grief as a teacher, releasing herself from guilt and shame and finding the inner strength to go from abandonment to forgiveness, from hopelessness to healing.

The Silence Between Us is a raw and original double memoir tracing a mother and daughter as they try to understand and rebuild their relationship after the daughter's suicide attempt. Because Oceane had just turned 18 when she attempts to end her life, the hospital has to respect her request: to not notify her parents. But despite the distance between them, Cécile knows something is wrong with her fiercely independent daughter. As Cécile steps in to care for Oceane, the two reckon with things left unsaid and begin to rebuild a relationship that is both fragile and beautiful.

Suzanne suffered five heart attacks and made it through open heart surgery. But even that pales in comparison to the horrors she faced as a young girl. Her childhood became the ‘stuff of nightmares’ after her father passed away and her mother, unable to get a job in Ireland, had to seek work in London. So ‘Mammy’ was forced into the heart-breaking decision to put Suzanne and her five siblings into church-run orphanages in Dublin while she worked away. It was just meant to be temporary.