Family Wanted: Adoption Stories

Family has always been fertile ground for writers. To the usual familial themes, adoption adds its own potent elements: mystery, luck, the questing for origins, the yearning for a child, the importance (or not) of blood ties, and fundamental questions about what it is to become a parent and a family. AM Homes writes of being relentlessly tracked down by her birth mother, and Bernard Cornwell about being adopted by members of a repressive religious sect; Tama Janowitz comically describes meeting her Chinese daughter for the first time, and Martin Rowson reflects on encountering his surprisingly numerous long-lost siblings; Matthew Engel wrestles with international red tape and social workers in his bid to adopt a child and Emily Prager writes movingly about how her young daughter came to terms with being adopted; Jonathan Rendall falls for his birth mother and Paula Fox writes about the joy of being reunited with the daughter she gave up for adoption decades before.