Love forms : a novel / by Claire Adam.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A heart-stirring novel about a mother's love, in all its forms, as a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption, from the prize-winning author of Golden Child

"A beautiful story full of vibrance and heart . . . explores what it means to be a woman and what it means to love."--Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers

"Reads like a Claire Keegan story expanded by Elizabeth Strout."-- The Times , "Best Books to Take on Holiday This Summer"

For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something is missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she's kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and--as was common in Trinidad back then--her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.

More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought. It's an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps--from Trinidad to Venezuela and then to London--and to question not only that fateful decision she'd made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.

Love Forms is a powerfully moving story of a woman in search of herself--a novel that rings with heartfelt empathy through the passages of a mother's life, depicting the enduring bonds of love, family, and home.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In the gripping and heart-rending latest from Adam (Golden Child), a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption decades earlier. When Dawn Bishop got pregnant at 16 in 1980, her wealthy parents, owners of a popular juice company in Trinidad and Tobago, sent her away to have the baby. Now 58 and a recently divorced former doctor in London with two grown sons, she decides she's ready to break the silence about her long-ago "mistake," as her parents called it. Hints of regret and holes in her memory pervade her narration as Dawn attempts to fit together the "disconnected pieces" of her life. She begins with her father taking action after he found out she was pregnant, arranging a harrowing journey for her with smugglers to Venezuela, where she had the baby in a convent. In the present day, she returns from London to Trinidad and Tobago, where her older brother helps her dig up clues about her daughter, but the heart of the novel is in Dawn's attempt to make sense of the trajectory of her life: "Maybe my story wasn't: Dawn, who made a mistake and brought shame to her family. Maybe it's: Dawn, mortal woman, who took a wrong turn in life and got lost." Readers won't want to put this down. Agent: Zoe Waldie, RCW Literary. (July)

Booklist Review

In the cinematic opening to Adam's (Golden Child, 2019) second novel, 16-year-old Dawn is being whisked away from her home in Trinidad to a nunnery in Venezuela in order to secretly complete an unwanted pregnancy and give the child up for adoption. It's the 1980s, and Dawn is a member of the proud, respectable, hardworking Bishop family, so this seems her only option. Decades later, Dawn is 58 and has been searching for the child she left behind a lifetime ago. Inquiry after inquiry has ended in disappointment and despair, and Dawn's obsession has fractured relations with her husband and sons. Along with Dawn's journey, Adam paints an illuminating portrait of Trinidadian culture and the social/political climate at the time, as well as that of neighboring Venezuela. Adam shines in her characterization of the Bishop family, their fascinating dynamics, brutal honesty, and most of all, their enduring love for one another. The core of this poignant novel is the powerful mother-child bond and its ability to endure even long after losing a child.