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All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
by Nicole Chung
What does it mean to lose your roots―within your culture, within your family―and what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood,…
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Almost Home: A Memoir
by Hilary Harper
While snooping in a closet as an adolescent, Hilary Harper discovers a secret: her parents are not her parents. Documents reveal her mother to be a vague, distant relative who died in a car crash. Her father is “unknown.” Vividly depicting the suburban Detroit neighborhood…
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American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption
by Gabrielle Glaser
During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell…
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American Bastard
by Jan Beatty
American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents–and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups–and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This…
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An Adoptee Lexicon
by Karen Pickell
Lyrical and informative, An Adoptee Lexicon is a glossary of adoption terminology from the viewpoint of an adult adoptee. Contemplating religion, politics, science, and human rights, Karen Pickell, who was born and adopted in the late 1960s, intersperses personal commentary and snippets from her own experience with…
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An Unkindness of Ravens
by Meg Kearney
In An Unkindness of Ravens, Meg Kearney’s poems weave voices of estrangement and redemption: mothers, daughters, lovers of gin and dead things. In the middle poems, the protagonist confronts “Raven”: a figure of guises and disguises, revealing the speaker’s fears and angst. National Book Critics…
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Assembling Self
by Karen Belanger
Born and adopted in 1959, at the age of two weeks, Karen had an inherent yearning her whole life to find more out about her biological background. Plagued by what seemed to be genetic health problems and illness the need for current family medical history…
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Await Your Reply
by Dan Chaon
The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences. Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy…
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Bastards: A Memoir
by Mary Anna King
In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is a little girl growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother Jacob and parents who, in her words, were “great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them.” After her…
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Becoming
by Laramie Harlow
15 unforgettable prose-poems and over 20 true short stories by NDN author Laramie Harlow. Becoming is the title of her impressive (and controversial) second collection. Her sensational first book SLEEPS WITH KNIVES was published in 2012 by Blue Hand Books. Her writing about being a…
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Becoming Patrick: A Memoir
by Patrick McMahon
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…
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Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe
by Lori Jakiela
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe is a book about mapping lives–the lives we are born with and the lives we are allowed to make for ourselves. Belief is part adoption narrative and part meditation on family, motherhood, nature vs. nurture, and what…
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Beneath a Tall Tree
by Jean Strauss
Bestselling author Jean Strauss’s memoir about her quest to unearth her past is an incredibly funny and touching journey that redefines the meaning of family and celebrates the universal connections that link us all. Adoptee Author: Jean Strauss Publication Year: 2001 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: …
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Between, Georgia
by Joshilyn Jackson
A fictional story about a woman caught between two feuding families — her adoptive and birth families — in the small town of Between, Georgia. Author: Joshilyn Jackson Publication Year: 2006 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate…
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Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents, and Adoptive Parents
by Jean A. S. Strauss
What happens when an adoptee decides to locate a birthparent or a birthparent wants to find a child given up long ago? How does one search for people whose names one does not know? And what happens during a reunion? In 1983, Jean A. S.…
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Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption
Susan Devan Harness
In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents.…
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Black Anthology: Adult Adoptees Claim Their Space
Edited by Susan Harris O’Connor, MSW; Diane René Christian; Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman, PhD
People who identify as Black adoptees are vaguely known within both adoption circles as well as universal discussions. We are just beginning to be introduced to one another. This anthology allows for the opportunity to see the rich diversity of a people; the uniqueness within…
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Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory
by James Cagney
The poems in Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory interrogate identity, family, loneliness, and the expectations of masculinity. Using dreams, blues, and a chorus of voices, this collection of poems examines the complexities of intimacy for an adopted person trying to find…
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Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found
by Jennifer Lauck
An account of the author’s childhood, including the deaths of her adoptive parents and Lauck’s discovery that she is adopted, told from her point of view as a child experiencing these events. Adoptee Author: Jennifer Lauck Publication Year: 1999 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop…
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Bonded at Birth: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots
by Gloria Oren
Bonded at Birth: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots is a story of loss, survival, determination, and persistence. It covers one state, three countries, and two continents. It covers sixteen years of searching and a little over four decades since her first adoption. After growing…
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Braverman (previously titled I Almost Fell Off the Top of the Empire State Building: A True Story of Trauma and Survival
by Joe Soll with Susan Hawvermale
From lying on a New Jersey highway with cars speeding by his head in both directions, to being shot in the head by a manic sniper and almost falling to his death from the top of the Empire State Building, Joe Soll’s autobiography details these…
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Called Home, Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects
Edited by Patricia Busbee and Trace A. DeMeyer
From recent news about Baby Veronica to history like Operation Papoose, this book examines how Native American adoptees and their families experienced adoption and were exposed to the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects. The editors Trace A. DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee, both…
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Connecting Threads: Five Siblings Lost and Found
by EM Blake
A graphic memoir about siblings of Indigenous and European-American heritage who are taken from their first family, placed in foster care, and most were adopted-a story of the journey to find each other and their first family. This is the story of the complex needs…
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Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel
by Susan Fedorko
Susie always knew she was adopted out at the early age of eleven months. She discovers at the age of forty who her biological family is. Susie discovers her birth mother is the first Native American supermodel “Cathee Dahmen.” This is her story. Adoptee Author: Susan…
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Daughter Reassembled: An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir
by Pam Cates
Pam Cates had led a charmed life. As a mother, wife, daughter, sister, and artist, she had everything she’d always dreamed of–a big house in the country, a wonderful husband, lovely daughter, her parents living next door, and time to paint and garden. She always…
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Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother: A Memoir
by Kevin Barhydt
Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kevin was enveloped in a labyrinth of adoption, addiction, and child sexual abuse. By age 20, a shell of the boy he once was, Kevin succumbed completely to a suicidal lifestyle of drug dealing and prostitution. At 45, after…
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Dear Wonderful You: Letters to Adopted & Fostered Youth
Edited by Diane René Christian and Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman, PhD
A powerful book filled with thoughtful and inspiring letters. This anthology was written by a global community of adult adoptees and adults who were fostered. Each letter was penned to the upcoming generation of adopted and fostered youth. Editors: Diane René Christian, Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman Adoptee…
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Do You Know Who I Am? An Infantryman’s Adoption Story of Finding Family after Fifty
by Christopher E. Harvey
Infantryman Christopher Harvey’s childhood ended at twelve years old when his mom casually told him that he was adopted. Consequently, adulthood for him began when he met his birth mother after he turned fifty. And he describes the thirty-eight years in between as a purgatory…
Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!
