BEST BOOKS ON... ADOPTION

THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.

THE theme of adoption has been a favourite of writers since the beginning of the novel itself. Think of Mansfield Park’s little Fanny Price and her daily, low-level abuse by the Bertrams, or any number of Dickens’s poor waifs and orphans.

It is the very stuff of drama. The hand of fate can just pick up a character and drop it into another life entirely, leaving a sense of displacement, an absence of belonging, that can make or break.

We have, thank goodness, moved on: the current system is legislated, sensitive and centres on the child. Yet My Name Is Leon shows that even quite recently, it was far from perfect — and it comes with the stamp of authority. Author Kit de Waal is a family lawyer, writing what she knows.

Little Leon tells his own story, starting in 1981 with the birth of his beloved baby brother and the beginning of his mother’s collapse. Their fostering is chaotic and their destinies different, because the baby is white and Leon is not.

The accepted wisdom now is that siblings should be kept together and honesty is everything.

In The Hand That First Held Mine, Maggie O’Farrell traces the fall-out when the truth of our own existence is kept from us. Ted has just become a father, his wife is in a state of postnatal trauma, and instead of supporting her he is haunted by flashbacks to his own infancy and the dislocation he always felt but never understood.

The story has the turbulence and grip of a thriller, as well as being an exploration of what makes us family.

For a completely positive take on this — or any other — issue, we can always rely on Anne Tyler. In Digging To America she deals with the modern phenomenon of global adoption.

It opens in Baltimore airport, where two very different families await the arrival from Asia of their new infant daughters. The Donaldsons and the Yazdis have nothing in common but soon find they are connected by their foreign babies. Because, in the end, it only takes love to feel we belong.