Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Fiction

  • The Swan Garden

    The Swan Garden

    by Anne Biggs

    The Swan Garden tells the story of a young woman who survives a brutal assault and rape, gives birth in a mother baby home, and the abuse she receives in the Magdalene Laundry. After finding a way to escape, she attempts to create a life for herself, but never…

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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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  • Umbilicus

    Umbilicus

    by Paula Gruben

    Charlotte van Katwijk guards herself like a secret. Kids are cruel, and she knows if they find out she’s adopted, she’ll be a bully’s easy target. When they are fourteen, Charlotte’s best friend’s mom commits suicide. It triggers in Charlotte a sense of urgency to…

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  • Unwanted Truths

    Unwanted Truths

    by Tricia Haddon

    Family secrets – we all have them. But some are more devastating than others…Jenny Porter knows the name of every capital city in the world, but that doesn’t mean she has all the answers. When she discovers she is adopted, she has nobody to turn…

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  • Waving Backwards

    Waving Backwards

    by V.L. Brunskill

    Imagine not knowing who you are, until you find yourself in a statue 800 miles from home. Join intensely passionate and fiercely independent New York college student Lara Bonavito on an unforgettable journey of self-discovery in sigh-worthy Savannah, Georgia. Adopted into an abusive and impoverished…

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  • We Take Me Apart

    We Take Me Apart

    by Molly Gaudry

    Shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry Nominated for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize “There is no more perfect place to be than in Molly Gaudry s tender, dirt-floored novella, We Take Me Apart. Oh cabbage leaves, oh roses, oh orange-slice childhood grins: this…

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  • What Is a Part of Me?

    What Is a Part of Me?

    by Ola Zuri

    This is the story of a young girl adopted transracially who has some struggles with finding answers to some difficult questions. Follow along with her as she learns some things about her past and finds out where her true strength is. Adoptee Author: Ola Zuri Publication…

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  • When the Ocean Flies

    When the Ocean Flies

    by Heather G. Marshall

    An email from a stranger tells Alison Earley that her natural father, whom she has known for only six years, has died suddenly. What begins as a short trip back to Scotland for a funeral soon becomes a journey that puts adoption, sexuality, and identity…

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  • When You Never Said Goodbye: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Birth Mother: A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries

    When You Never Said Goodbye: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Birth Mother: A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries

    by Meg Kearney

    A student at NYU in Greenwich Village, Liz McLane is pursuing her dream of becoming a poet and, at the same time, determined to find her birth mother, no matter what the results may be. Through her journals, Liz records her struggle to navigate adoption…

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  • Where Do I Belong?

    Where Do I Belong?

    by Ola Zuri

    The story is about a young boy who was adopted transracially and feels that something in his family isn’t quite right. He wonders and worries about where he fits and where he belongs. Follow him as he soon discovers the answers. Adoptee Author: Ola Zuri Publication…

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  • Why Can’t You Look Like Me?

    Why Can’t You Look Like Me?

    by Ola Zuri

    Follow along on a young girl’s journey as she wonders Why Can’t You Look Like Me of those around her. She is an African American girl adopted transracially and feels like she doesn’t fit in, even within her own family. This tender book shows how…

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  • Y: A Novel

    Y: A Novel

    by Marjorie Celona

    Growing up in foster homes, Shannon chooses to define life on her own terms, but she never stops wondering why she was abandoned. Brilliantly interwoven with Shannon’s story is the tale of her mother, Yula, a girl herself who is facing a desperate fate in…

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  • You Remind Me of Me

    You Remind Me of Me

    by Dan Chaon

    You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager…

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