Love Forms: A Novel
BOOKER PRIZE LONGLIST • “A vibrant, heartstrings-tugging novel” (People) 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 . . . 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”
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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.
“A beautiful story . . . 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”
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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.
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Community Reviews
A perfect read for Bookclubs.
“I think about the girl I had in Venezuela, as well. ‘Think’ isn’t exactly the right word; it’s not exactly thinking that I do. She just drifts in and out of my thoughts, in the way that a breeze might quietly pass through a room.”
For many parents, a time will come when they must make a difficult choice on behalf of their child. It might bear long-term consequences, and it might be a choice that later cannot be undone. When the child reaches the age of majority, she or he will be living in a different world. Mores will have no doubt changed, if that is a factor. Whatever the case, that child will have her or his own opinion about the choice made for them. In Dawn’s case, it will lead to a life of searching.
Dawn is from a Trinidadian family “more or less classed as white,” she says, whose wealth and standing began with fruit juice. It was 1980 when she when to Carnival with her more experienced friend, Angie. She wanted to impress Angie when she led a tourist to the beach. Dawn was sixteen at the time, and she became pregnant from that encounter. When her parents found out, they arranged for a dangerous water crossing to Venezuela under cover of darkness. She would spend the remaining months of her pregnancy in an isolated house along with other young girls like herself who had been sent away to have and lose their babies in secret.
Trinidadian social standards were rigid at the time, as they were elsewhere. Dawn would have been penalized if her pregnancy had been discovered. She never would have freed herself of the stigma. But what really drove Dawn’s parents to send her away? Their standing on the island, that much is clear. Dawn was on her own.
This book is a heartbreaking story about seeking what was taken yet might never be found.
“Everybody keeps telling you the same thing. Just put it behind you. What you think you can do about it now?”
Many thanks to Random House Publishing Group—Random House and NetGalley for this e-ARC.
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