Books

Not So Disconnected: Finding Stuart 

Gloria was eighty-three years old when she sat down at her kitchen table and told Diane Reardon what she knew about her father. It didn't take long. She had a name — Stuart Law — a connection to the Tank Corps, and a half-remembered visit to a woman who might have been his sister. That was everything.

Three years later, Diane had an answer. The man Gloria had been searching for had lived one of the most extraordinary lives she had ever uncovered — a Spanish Civil War volunteer, a prisoner of war, a man who crossed oceans under borrowed names and saved a life in a heavy swell off the coast of Australia. He had died in Southampton in 1994, fifty miles from Gloria, never knowing she was still looking.

Not So Disconnected is the story of three years of DNA research, archive searches across four countries, and the moment in a kitchen in Sussex when everything Gloria had wondered about for a lifetime finally had an answer.

When Diane finally told her who he was, Gloria looked at his photograph for the first time and said: now I don't feel so disconnected.