The news broke that Love Forms by Claire Adam had been longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize just as I was finishing reading this novel. It’s a deserved recognition of a book that is lovely and beguiling, yet also quietly powerful and devastating.
The story sounds deceptively simple, yet Adam’s writing style pulled me in from the first few pages, and I was away, and reading hungrily. Narrated in the first person, Dawn Bishop’s voice is gentle, slow, mediative.
It opens as Dawn is going through the motions of her days. Originally from Trinidad, she went to medical school in the UK, married a fellow doctor, had two sons and then divorced. Now in her late 50s, she hasn’t practised medicine since her sons were children and finds herself earning a living as a letting agent.
Concurrent with this is her account of her pregnancy at 16 in 1980. It’s unplanned and unwanted; a moment of throwing caution to the wind results in her having to make a decision that will affect her entire life, a decision that a 16-year-old is surely ill-equipped to make.
As Dawn goes through her days in London, invites a friend for supper and a movie one night, one of her grown sons the next night, the story moves across the present and the past. Guided by her parents, it was decided that Dawn would travel to Venezuela via boat in an illegal crossing. Once there she was taken to a home run by nuns for girls in her situation. When the babies are born, they are quickly whisked away to be adopted, and the girls carry on with their lives.
But how easy is it to just “carry on” after having made such a decision? In the case of Dawn, though she has achieved an education, lives in another country, and gives birth to two more children, she remains haunted by the daughter she gave up. One night she blurts out what has been a secret to her two young sons. Her husband was unaware that she had already borne a child, until the night her first son was born. Dawn’s parents had agreed that long ago day, that once “it” was over, they wouldn’t talk about it.
But there’s harm in keeping silences, and Dawn remains haunted by the fact that she gave up her child. In time she starts searching for her. The internet age arrives, and more avenues for finding people open up. Each time the search has ended in the realisation that the various women she finds are not her daughter.
The novel opens with Dawn searching again for that child; she has been in communication with an Italian woman, Monica, who was adopted in South America. They establish an easy connection, with both hoping for a successful conclusion. This is set against the narrative that also takes us through the rest of Dawn’s life, from her 16-year-old self, through the events that have led her to this point as the decades have gone past.
But the thread running alongside her life is that painful longing to know and find her daughter. She imagines her daughter: “She might be doing a business degree at the university. Maybe learning English in the evenings. It was that happy vision that made it possible for me to live, most of the time, like an ordinary person.”
However, there is often an ache within Dawn: “But then, of course, there were other times when the realisation of her absence returned. It always arrived somewhere in my abdomen, the sudden shock, like remembering laundry left out in the rain, or children not picked up from school.” And then there are memories and visits back to Trinidad, and the colour and tropical heat of the island are lovingly described (Adam herself is from the island).
Dawn broaches the subject of the adoption with her mother, then her father, but they too remember so little. Where was the house where Dawn gave birth? They just can’t remember. Details are too hazy, memories too old.
In the final quarter of the novel Dawn returns to Trinidad on holiday, her gown-up sons taking time off from their busy work schedules. During the trip her mother reveals that they have done some research and know where the home where Dawn gave birth is. Some answers might be forthcoming. Dawn also gets the results of the DNA test that she and Monica have taken.
In another clandestine trip, this time via a tiny aeroplane, Dawn visits the home in Venezuela with her brother. It is in ruins, but she remembers the place now, memory so long denied or suppressed restores some parts of her past to her.
This is a novel about being a mother, about that fierce, strong, unbreakable attachment to one’s children. In one of the conversations with her father this is shown when she recalls saying, “Mothers will fight off lions. I know you’re going to say there are no lions, but what I’m saying is, we’ll fight them.”
As the novel closes with a memory, the devastating impact of giving up a child for adoption is revealed in just a few spare words.
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