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The Strand: A Novel of Institutional Silence
Paperback
General FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Madi Preda
Published: Mar 9 2026
Pages: 280
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.59 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Some lives are erased quietly.
Some silences are enforced by record.
This is a story about refusing both.
On the Irish coast, a young woman named Máire is allowed to hold her newborn daughter for only ten minutes before the child is taken from her care and absorbed into an institutional system designed to disappear women like her. The baby is renamed administratively, recorded as Infant Female, and removed into sealed files, euphemism, and silence.
What follows is not a single act of cruelty, but a lifetime shaped by absence.
Decades later, Máire has rebuilt a life and raised a second daughter, Nóra, yet the first child's disappearance remains present-unspoken but undeniable. As a public inquiry exposes fragments of the institutions that governed Máire's past, Nóra begins to take up the archive her mother has assembled over the years. Together, they confront redacted records, deflected responsibility, and the bureaucratic architecture of erasure.
The Strand: A Novel of Institutional Silence is a literary psychological suspense novel about motherhood, inheritance, and the slow violence of administration. It traces how harm is normalised through paperwork and delay-and how truth survives not through spectacle or confession, but through accuracy, persistence, and refusal.
Set against the stark beauty of the Irish coastline, this novel resists easy closure in favour of moral clarity. It is a story of loss without sentimentality, endurance, without consolation, and justice pursued not as reversal, but as recognition.
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