Love Forms

In the gripping and heart-rending latest from Adam (Golden Child), a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption decades earlier. When Dawn Bishop got pregnant at 16 in 1980, her wealthy parents, owners of a popular juice company in Trinidad and Tobago, sent her away to have the baby. Now 58 and a recently divorced former doctor in London with two grown sons, she decides she’s ready to break the silence about her long-ago “mistake,” as her parents called it. Hints of regret and holes in her memory pervade her narration as Dawn attempts to fit together the “disconnected pieces” of her life. She begins with her father taking action after he found out she was pregnant, arranging a harrowing journey for her with smugglers to Venezuela, where she had the baby in a convent. In the present day, she returns from London to Trinidad and Tobago, where her older brother helps her dig up clues about her daughter, but the heart of the novel is in Dawn’s attempt to make sense of the trajectory of her life: “Maybe my story wasn’t: Dawn, who made a mistake and brought shame to her family. Maybe it’s: Dawn, mortal woman, who took a wrong turn in life and got lost.” Readers won’t want to put this down. Agent: Zoe Waldie, RCW Literary. (July)