With the breadth and cumulative force of a novel, "Mother of Sorrows presents ten interwoven stories of an American family starting out in the post--World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., a world of identical brick houses and sunstruck, treeless lawns, a world of initial hopefulness from which shame and loss have seemingly been banished. This is the story of two adolescent brothers whose father has suddenly died, and of their beautiful and complicated mother, a mother whom the younger son worshipfully imagines as "Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches . . . Our Mother of the Gorgeous Gypsy Earrings . . . Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes . . . Our Mother of Sudden Attentiveness . . . Our Mother of Sudden Anger." This is the brother who narrates these tales as he looks back thirty years later, the only remaining survivor of a world he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever, a world of sorrow that has held him spellbound even as he has attempted to create a life of his own.
Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann's extraordinary language," Mother of Sorrows introduces us to a voice that is urgent, contemplative, elegant, angry, revelatory, and like no other in contemporary fiction.

Richard McCann's account of his childhood became a massive UK bestseller. In it he told the harrowing story of how he and his sisters were left motherless when the Yorkshire Ripper killed his first victim, Richard's mother Wilma McCann. Just A Boy was praised for its unflinching and unself-pitying account of a neglected childhood at the hands of an abusive father and uncaring authorities. The Boy Grows Up is an account of how Richard used the success of Just A Boy to try and save his sister, and of his attempts to make sense of his past whilst learning more about the effects of traumatic childhoods and loss.

One October night in 1975 Richard, aged five, was alone in the house with his three sisters. It was 3am and their mother hadn't come home yet, so he and his eldest sister set off through the foggy streets to find her. At dawn they returned home alone. Next morning, the police arrived to take the children away. Their mother had become the first victim of a serial killer soon to become known as the 'Yorkshire Ripper'. Passed from one violent home to another, the children were forgotten by all except the press. As the salacious headlines multiplied, Richard and his sisters were never able to recover from their mother's murder. Whilst Richard tried to handle the terror of his violent upbringing, his sister struggled to deal with memories of sexual abuse. Without love or support they spiralled away from help or happiness. Until one day when Richard McCann, having reached suicidal rock bottom, decided no one was going to rescue their lives but him. It was the beginning of an inspirational transformation. Now he is able to tell the story of how the forgotten children of violence suffer, and how they can heal. A heartbreaking, uplifting story of survival and hope.