First poetry collection by UK poet Patience Agbabi. Portions of the collection are reportedly autobiographical. Adoptee Author: Patience Agbabi Publication Year: 1995 Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews: Read More →

A glorious poetic take on all things black, white, and read. Reinventing the sonnet, Patience Agbabi shines her euphoric, musical lines on everything from growing up to growing old, from Northern Soul to contract killers, from the retro to the brand new. Whether resurrecting the dead in Problem Pages, playing outRead More →

In Telling Tales, award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-century remix of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, retelling all of the stories, from the Miller’s Tale to the Wife of Bath’s, in her own critically acclaimed poetic style. Celebrating Chaucer’s Middle-English masterwork for its performance element as well as its poetryRead More →

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red Dust Road is one ofRead More →

Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl’s adoption by a white Scottish couple- from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter. Adoptee Author: Jackie Kay Publication Year: 1991 Adoptee Reviews:  Patience Agbabi at The Independent Other Reviews: Read More →

Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would better understand and encompass her.Read More →

When Pat McMahon risks the love of the mother who raised him by seeking out the mother who gave him away, he transforms from a mild-mannered engineer into a frenetic detective. After he overcomes the challenges of existential angst, bureaucratic roadblocks, and unemployment, the phone call to his first motherRead More →

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as thisRead More →

A memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It is the story of how a painful past that Jeanette thought she’d written over and repainted rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. Adoptee Author: Jeanette Winterson Publication Year: 2012Read More →