A transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood
from an award-winning author.
Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her
infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American
woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in
the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink
jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a
bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise
the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother:
Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen,
and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.
In rendering Souria's separation from her family across vast stretches
of desert and Shannon's alienation from her mother under the same roof,
Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma
and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both,
these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning.
Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical
and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival,
in the name of love.
