Overview
Two sons are born into a prominent Northern Irish Unionist family. Their father, Wallace Clark, is a pioneering sailor in Irish waters, a maritime historian and a chronicler of the family linen-making business in County Derry. The brothers, while different in character – Bruce intellectually and spiritually curious; Miles confident and socially outgoing – both inherit their father's questing spirit. They also experience a privileged Unionist upbringing during the darkest years of Northern Ireland's Troubles.
By 1993 – newly married, charismatic and handsome, and already a much-praised writer and explorer – the thirty-three-year-old Miles seems to have the world at his feet. But tragedy now strikes. Less than a year after completing a unique circumnavigation of Europe via the waterways of Russia, Miles commits suicide.
Bruce, working as a foreign correspondent in Moscow at the time of his younger brother's death, sets out to reflect on the tragedy – to place his brother's suicide within a wider context. In Too Foreign a Place, he combines memoir with a journalistic impulse to grapple with the separate, and often conflicting, quests of a father and his two sons who sought liberation from the rigid confines of their Ulster Unionist background. Bruce traces the brothers' gilded childhood; charts their first steps – and early successes and setbacks – in their respective careers; explores the potentially unsettling discoveries Miles made on his expedition; and considers the contrasting impulses that led these two very different brothers to seek fulfilment and adventure in a fracturing and volatile Russia.
As he anatomises a tragic family saga and comes to terms with his own personal grief, Bruce Clark reflects on the two political collapses that frame his narrative: the chaotic downfall of Soviet communism which he covered for The Times and the slower disintegration of the old Unionist order in Northern Ireland.
This story, rich in political and emotional detail, will stay with you long after reading.
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