458 pages | 5” × 8” | Standard Paperback
Thalidomide changed Leslie Millar’s life before he had even taken his first breath. But its consequences did not end with him. They rippled through an entire family for more than sixty years.
In this powerful sequel to Silent Victims: Part 1, which revealed the devastating impact of Thalidomide on his mother, Margaret, Alderman Gary Millar MBE turns to the wider story of a family forced to live in the long shadow of one of the greatest medical tragedies of the twentieth century.
At its heart is Leslie Millar — a Thalidomide survivor who spent his life navigating a world too often unwilling to understand, accept or include him.
Through family photographs, personal memories, previously untold stories and painstaking research, Gary reconstructs Leslie’s remarkable life while uncovering a much bigger story: what happens to a family when the consequences of a medical disaster do not disappear, but pass silently from one decade to the next?
This is not simply Leslie’s story.
It is the story of parents carrying guilt and grief. Of brothers and sisters growing up alongside trauma. Of discrimination, lost opportunities and battles for dignity. But it is also a story filled with humour, determination, love and extraordinary resilience.
Silent Victims: Part 2 exposes the hidden human cost of Thalidomide — a cost measured not only in physical disability, but in the emotional scars carried by entire families.
Raw, intimate and ultimately hopeful, this book gives a voice to those whose suffering was rarely recorded, whose stories were too easily overlooked, and whose lives deserve to be remembered.
They were the silent victims. This is their story.