Stories of adopted and foster-care children are some of the hardest to read, and the better the writing, the more difficult I find it to persevere. On occasions, I had to stop reading Celona’s book and walk away, which I believe is the sign of a powerful novel.

A baby girl is abandoned outside the YMCA (hence the Y of the title) and we watch through the eyes of a bystander as her life unfolds from there. She changes names as frequently as she changes foster homes, but finally ends up as settled as she’s ever going to be, named Shannon with a mother in Miranda and sister in Lydia-Rose. A rebellious and uninterested teenager, she is restless and constantly searching for something more. The realisation slowly dawns on her that what she really wants is to find her parents, and discover what happened to them and why she was left.

What is particularly fascinating about Y is that the chapters on Shannon are interspersed with chapters detailing the story of her mother, and just how things ended up with the baby abandoned on the steps of the YMCA. But while we’re given information about her family, the actual reasoning behind her abandonment doesn’t come until the very last pages. The first half of the book feels like a disaster, with messy threads lying loosely here and there, but then it all slowly pulls together to create a picture of strange tenderness, filled with heavy emotions as well as small hopes for the future.

Kate Rockstrom is from Readings Carlton