About the Book
Splintered Shadows traces Marilyn F. Moriarty’s search for her mother’s hidden past. Beginning with a name on a 1945 photograph, she follows scattered clues across Europe, uncovering a life shaped by resistance, secrecy, and survival in Nazi-occupied France.
What Book Reviewers Have to Say:
This memoir recounts Moriarty’s search through decades of archival research; reviewers have shared their thoughts on the memoir with the Press. Read more to hear about this title with a riveting World War II backdrop by award-winning author Marilyn Moriarty.
“Like many seekers, Marilyn F. Moriarty found herself in a box of old photographs.” . . .
When she was growing up in Florida, Marilyn F. Moriarty was curious about her late mother. Andrée Beauxyeux was born in Paris in 1920. . . . Moriarty’s desire to understand her roots was the starting point for her journey across the ocean and into the lives of French relatives she didn’t know she had. Moriarty learned that in 1943, Andrée was a member of the French Resistance. When captured, she was declared an enemy of the Reich and sentenced to four years of hard labor.
A book about identity, courage, adventure and loss that a great number of people are going to stay up nights reading!
– Jay Atkinson is the author of five works of fiction and five narrative nonfiction books. His book, Massacre on the Merrimack: Hannah Duston’s Captivity and Revenge in Colonial America (Lyons Press, New York) won the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction.
Splintered Shadows is a powerful memoir, intriguing from beginning to end, and full of fascinating and disturbing ironies. Through Moriarty’s fine writing and meticulous research, we bear witness to some of the wreckage left behind after World War II. Moriarty guides us through a compelling and chilling pilgrimage searching for memories of her mother. Her journey begins when she is 14 years old, after her mother drops dead at age of 47, from a heart attack. She discovers her sister and herself are adopted from different families. Her mother was sentenced to four years in German prison when she was caught by the Gestapo. At the end of the War her mother met and married an American Officer. Searching for her individual and national identities led Moriarty to four countries [and more than forty years of her life. “I found no order in the universe, only wounded families trying to heal in the face of unspeakable hardships.” This gifted storyteller eases us to and from the past and present with tenacity and sharp intellect.
— Ethel Morgan Smith, author of Path to Grace: Reimaging the Civil Rights Movement, Winner of the 2023 Eudora Welty Prize
Order Splintered Shadows Today
This book is a great read for anyone interested in WWII History, archival research, adoptee-search narratives, or memoir enjoyers. Secure your copy today at the UNG Press Bookstore: https://ungpressbooks.com/store/splintered-shadows/
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