Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About LGBTQIA Adoptees or Parents

  • The Last Invisible Continent: Essays on Adoption and Identity

    The Last Invisible Continent: Essays on Adoption and Identity

    by Michael Allen Potter

    These twelve essays span nearly twenty years of research and activism that chronicle one man’s search for his family. Together, they explore the concept of personal identity from the perspective of someone who was erased completely by adoption in The State of New York. Adoptee…

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  • The Lucky Daughter

    The Lucky Daughter

    by Mariama J. Lockington

    Poetry. “Mariama J. Lockington’s The Lucky Daughter digs deep into the physicality of moving through this world as a queer woman of color. These poems – about race, sexuality, families (found, formed, and inherited) – are brutal in their honesty and beauty. “a girl” Lockington…

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  • The Mistress’s Daughter

    The Mistress’s Daughter

    by A. M. Homes

    The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the…

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  • The Perks of Being an Adoptee

    The Perks of Being an Adoptee

    by Mae Claire

    Adoption is complex and each adoption is unique. There is something that unites all adoptees though and it is loss. Many find happiness, joy, understanding, and their birth family while at the same time experiencing great pain. There are also adoptees who have had less…

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  • The Safety of Objects: Stories

    The Safety of Objects: Stories

    by A. M. Homes

    Originally published in 1990 to wide critical acclaim, this extraordinary first collection of stories by A. M. Homes confronts the real and the surreal on even terms to create a disturbing and sometimes hilarious vision of the American dream. Included here are “Adults Alone,” in…

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  • The Son with Two Moms

    The Son with Two Moms

    by Tony Hynes

    Tony was taken in at the age of three by Mary Hynes and Janet Simons, after being separated from his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. After that time, he was shuffled in and out of his grandmothers home before being placed in an orphanage, where…

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  • Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories

    Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories

    by A. M. Homes

    Homes’s distinctive narratives illuminate our dreams and desires, our memories and losses, and our profound need for connection, and demonstrate how extraordinary the ordinary can be. In “Chinese Lesson,” we meet Geordie, a man watching over his wandering, senile mother-in-law by means of an electronic…

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  • This Book Will Save Your Life

    This Book Will Save Your Life

    by A. M. Homes

    Richard Novak is a modern-day Everyman, a middle-aged divorcé trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one—except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. He is functionally dead and doesn’t even notice…

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  • Transformatrix

    Transformatrix

    by Patience Agbabi

    “They call me Jax, though my real name’s Eva / The whole of the Jackson Five rolled into one serious diva / No.1 on the guest list, top of the charts / When I make my grand entrance, the sea of sequins parts…” From Hamburg to…

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  • We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

    We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

    by Roxanna Asgarian

    The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children–and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the…

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  • When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    Edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung

    There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of powerful, poignant, and evocative stories in a variety of genres. These tales from fifteen bestselling,…

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  • Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

    Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

    by Jeanette Winterson

    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.…

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  • You’ll Always Be White To Me: A Memoir

    You’ll Always Be White To Me: A Memoir

    by Garon Wade

    Three years in to Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, an abandoned baby ends up in the adopted arms of a white American couple living in a Colombo home that doubles as a CIA safe house. They take him on an extraordinary journey around the globe…

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