Love Forms by Claire Adam

Long listed for The Booker Prize 2025

‘A quietly devastating masterpiece’ Marian Keyes.

In the heart-aching new novel from the author of the award-winning Golden Child, a mother searches for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago. Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela.

There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption. Dawn tries to carry on with her life – a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce – but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been. Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch.

She says that she might be Dawn’s long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer?

Hardback / 304 pages