Earthblood. Keith Laumer & Rosel George Brown. 1966. 253p. Doubleday. We don’t know what’s happened to humanity, but its legacy is a proud one. And embryos with human genes are prized above all others. Roan is ’purchased’ as an embryo, brought to term and raised by his adopted parents, and spends his life seeking his roots. His trials and adventures appeal to teenagers and teenagers-at-heart with questions of ’Who am I?’, ’Where did I come from?’, ’Why am I different from everyone else?’, ’What makes me unique?’. Roan’s parents bankrupt themselves for the opportunity to purchase a son that may actually be human. As a boy living a poor, integrated neighborhood (with all forms of aliens), Roan experiences poverty, prejudice, fear, and dreams for a better life. A traveling, galactic circus gives Roan a chance to experience a new life, where friendship, love, loyalty, and competition give him a chance to develop and forge new relationships while exploring the possibilities of his heritage. After a pirate attack on the circus, Roan learns to exercise some control over his environment and to become a leader. Roan ultimately traces his lineage back to Terra, where he acts to replace the decadent descendents of humanity with a race that will one day reclaim its place in determining the destiny of the galaxy.

Earthquake Weather. Tim Powers. 1997. 414p. Tor. Set in an imaginative alternate version of modern Los Angeles, Earthquake Weather begins with the murder of the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. His body is taken to the magically protected home of the Sullivans, and their 13-year-old adopted son, Koot, a boy destined to be the next Fisher King. But for now, he must aid in reuniting Scott Crane’s body and spirit, and restoring him to life.

Eddie’s Bastard. William Kowalski. 2000. 384p. HarperCollins. Whoever Billy Mann’s mother was, she wasn’t one to mince words. “Eddie’s Bastard” is the only inscription on the note taped to a picnic basket containing the infant, which is left on the doorstep of “herbalist and failed entrepreneur, Thomas Mann Junior.” The depressed Mann immediately accepts that the child is the offspring of his own son, Eddie, recently killed in Vietnam, and sets out to raise him. As Billy Mann himself desrcibes it, “Grandpa had been a father in a time when men had nothing to do with the actual day-to-day business of raising children. Men didn’t change diapers, warm bottles, or nurse babies. As a result, it was Grandpa’s wife, and not Grandpa himself, who knew how to do all these things. Had she still been around, no doubt she would have taken over the business of raising me herself. But she—my grandmother—was no longer present to discuss it with; she’d simply disappeared one day when my father, Eddie, was still little, just after the Fiasco of the Ostriches, and Grandpa had never heard from her or of her again.” Still, Grandpa perseveres and baby Billy prospers under his unconventional care. As a child, Billy leads an isolated life—he is home-schooled, and their nearest neighbors, the Simpsons, live half a mile away and are on bad terms with Grandpa anyway. But Billy has his family history to keep him company—the Manns were once prominent and wealthy, before the ostrich débacle—not to mention the ghosts who share the Mann house and occasionally play tricks on the living inhabitants. At age 7, however, he ventures further afield than his backyard and meets Annie Simpson, a little girl with a terrible secret. While Billy’s relationships with his grandfather and his childhood friend are central to the novel, William Kowalski packs his story with lively subplots including a family curse, the identity of Billy’s mother, and a legendary diary belonging to a Mann ancestor. Eddie’s Bastard is a coming-of-age story that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Though the standard elements of domestic drama are all here—abandonment, child abuse, alcoholism, death, and loss of innocence—whenever possible, Kowalski prefers to leaven his tragedy with a wink. Only a comedian would bankrupt a family with ostriches, after all. —Alix Wilber About the Author: William Kowalksi grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Toronto, Canada. Eddie’s Bastard, his first novel, has been translated into nine languages. His second novel, Somewhere South of Here, the sequel to Eddie’s Bastard is coming out in hardcover from HarperCollins in 2001.

8th Journal, The. Nicole Parris. 2006. 457p. BookSurge Publishing. Taking a year off from college, Holly learns that she was adopted and that her birth mother wrote bestselling fantasy books called the Buzz series. Though Holly’s mom died with her series unfinished, she willed to her clueless, untried daughter the completion of the run. Thrust into the New York City publishing world, Holly deals with ambitious agents and covetous hangers-on while seeking out the last journal of an explorer ancestor, the real Buzz who inspired her mother’s books. Parris has elements of a rip-roaring story here. She understands plotting—after giving excessive background information about the death of Holly’s mom, the book picks up steam and doesn’t relent until the last page. A cliffhanger ends each short chapter, or a new twist develops in the first page of the next. The smoothly moving story percolates with irresistible energy. Parris deftly skewers the rapacity of publishers, portraying the competition over Holly and her mother’s legacy as a James Bond-esque affair with double agents, high stakes and explosive revelations. Still, the author’s reliance on beginner-level narrative tactics bogs down the book. Everyone worships Holly: her loving adoptive parents, devoted but tragically absent birth parents, long-suffering boyfriend, and a coterie of professors and agents. Her unrealistic charisma and flawless persona (aside from understandable crabbiness when her mom’s agent turns her life upside down) puts her dangerously close to Mary Sue territory. Additionally and most damningly, Parris bungles a b-plot in which a descendant of one of Buzz’s co-explorers wants a cut of the fame. As a black man whose ancestor’s experiences were ignored, Gilbert has legitimate grievances, but the author reduces him to a snobbish-yet-idiotic twit, giving a nasty edge to an otherwise rollicking action/adventure. — Kirkus Discoveries

Eleanor Rigby. Douglas Coupland. 2005. 256p. Bloomsbury USA. On a summer night in 1997, a comet streaks across the skies. Liz Dunn has nothing in her life but impending oral surgery and an armful of video rentals to get her through her solitary convalscence in her condo. She’s overweight, crabby, and plain, but behind her dull exterior lurks a mind sharpened by years of observation and contemplation. Liz decides to seek peace in her life rather than certainty—and then along comes another comet, in the form of a young man admitted to the local hospital with her name and number inscribed on his medical alert bracelet: In case of emergency, contact Liz Dunn. A charming lost soul and a strange visionary, Jeremy upends Liz’s quiet existence, triggering a chain of events that take her to the other side of the world and back, endangering her life just as a real chance at happiness finally seems within reach.

Ellen Foster: A Novel. Kaye Gibbons. 1987. 146p. Algonquin Books. Ellen Foster takes things as they come. She judges people shrewdly and well. After the death of her mother she lives with several different people: first her father, then a teacher, then her grandmother, then her aunt. These situations all prove to be unsatisfactory. Finally Ellen discovers a family where she at last is wanted and loved.

English American, The. Alison Larkin. 2008. 352p. Simon & Schuster. Adopted at birth into a loving, tidy family, charming, chronically untidy Pippa Dunn hopes that finding her birth parents will help her understand why she’s so different from everyone she knows—and somehow cure her of her inability to trust even the most devoted of men. She meets her untidy, creative birth mother in Georgia, her charismatic birth father in Washington, DC—and moves to New York to be near them, while pursuing an exciting new career. At the same time, she re-connects with a man she hardly knows, who also seems to understand her and sends her seductive emails from around the world. She’s found her “self” and everything she thought she wanted. Or has she? About the Author: Alison Larkin was adopted at birth in Washington, DC, by British parents and raised in England and Africa. After graduation from the University of London and the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she became a regular on the British stage with appearances on Broadway, a ubiquitous voice-over artist, and a successful stand-up comic. Her internationally acclaimed one-woman show, The English American, was a highlight of the London Comedy Festival. For more information, go to www.alisonlarkin.com.

English Patient, The. Michael Ondaatje. 1992. 307p. McClelland & Stewart (Canada). Canadian poet/novelist Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion, 1987, etc.) assembles, mosaic-fashion, the lives of four occupants of an Italian villa near Florence at the end of WW II. The war-damaged villa, its grounds strewn with mines, has gone from to German stronghold to Allied hospital, its sole occupants now a young Canadian nurse, Hana, and her last patient, a burn victim. They are joined by David Caravaggio, an Italian-Canadian friend of Hana’s father but also a thief used by Western intelligence, and Kip (Kirpal Singh), an Indian sapper in the British Army. So: a dying man and two wrecks—for David has become a morphine addict after his recent capture and torture, while Hana, who coped with the loss of her soldier sweetheart and their child (aborted), has been undone by news of her father’s death. Only Kip is functioning efficiently, defusing the mines. Ondaatje superimposes on this tableau the landscape of the pre-war North African desert, with its strange brotherhood of Western explorers, filtered through the consciousness of Hana’s patient. Though he claims to have forgotten his identity during the fiery fall from his plane into the desert, it seems the putative Englishman is the Hungarian explorer (and sometime German spy) Almasy; but such puzzles count for less than his erudition (his beloved Herodotus is the novel’s presiding spirit), his internationalism (“Erase nations!”), and his doomed but incandescent love affair with the bride of an English explorer—an affair ignited by the desert and Herodotus, and a dramatic contrast to the “formal celibacy” of the love developing at the villa between Hana and Kip, which ends (crudely) when Kip learns of the Hiroshima bombing, discovers his racial identity, and quits the white man’s war. A challenging, disorienting, periodically captivating journey without maps, best when least showy, as in the marvelous account of Kip’s adoption by an eccentric English peer, his bomb-disposal instructor. — From Kirkus Reviews; ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Eskimo Kissing. Kate Mosse. 1966. Hodder & Stoughton (London). Author’s first novel in which she explores the themes of adoption, lost identities and forgiveness. Sam’s secure and “normal” family life is shattered by unexpected events forcing her on a quest for self-identity. About the Author: Kate Mosse has written several works of non-fiction, in addition to Eskimo Kissing. She lives with her partner and their two young children in the south of England.

Even Now. Susan S Kelly. 2001. 288p. Warner. From Kirkus Reviews: From the author of How Close We Come (1998), an appealing, rueful, lost-illusions tale of two women who meet again in a small Blue Ridge Mountain town after many years apart and reassess their treasured childhood friendship. Narrator Hannah Marsh, her loving husband, Hal, and their two good children, 11-year-old Ellen and 15-year-old Mark, seem to have everything when they move to Rural Ridge, North Carolina. Hal, a successful businessman needing a change, has accepted a job teaching school in nearby Asheville. Their new house is charming, the mountain views splendid, and Hannah, a gardener, eagerly anticipates being able to grow all the bulbs that failed to thrive in Durham. But an encounter with Peter Whicker, the local Episcopalian priest, who turns out to be married to her old friend Daintry O’Connor, soon blights what was to have been paradise. Hannah and Daintry grew up in Cullen, a small mill town. Daintry, like her siblings, was adopted (her father was an idealistic and underpaid pediatrician). Hannah’s family was more affluent and socially prominent, but she envied the freewheeling O’Connors and, enthralled by Daintry’s beauty and authoritative ways, became her devoted follower. Now, as she settles in, Hannah recalls with mixed feelings the happy times they shared as well as Daintry’s increasingly hurtful behavior (she once set Hannah up with a date who got her drunk), which led to their estrangement when Hannah went away to boarding school. Daintry, now a high-powered businesswoman, seems cool, even rude, so Hannah feels no guilt about her own attraction to Peter, who seems to understand her better than Hal. While Hannah plants a garden near the church cemetery at Peter’srequest, they talk, flirt, and then plan an extramarital fling. Hannah finds herself falling in love, but she has not reckoned with Daintry, who has some equally mixed memories of their friendship to share. Amiable beach reading.

Every Good Deed. Dorothy Whipple. 1946. Chivers Press. Gwen Dobson is rescued from her uncongenial surroundings by the Misses Topham but responds oddly to their educational efforts. She pefers Jazz to Chopin and runs away with the drummer of a dance band. As a result, Philip is born and she returns and abandons him to their care. Nineteen years later she returns with another son, and a new husband and uses the sisters’ love of Philip as a lever for exhorting money from them. And once more the sisters go through the agony of seeing their love and care rejected.

Everything is Not Enough. [William] Lloyd Duncan. 2004. 400p. Xlibris Corporation. Over 16,000,000 men served in the armed forces in WWII. Perhaps as many as 3%, or 480,000, had a homosexual orientation. Admittedly, several thousand were screened out before being inducted, and some later received Undesirable Discharges. 120,000 of these men saw combat action, and undoubtedly hundreds were killed, and thousands were wounded. Jack Scott, by far the most outstanding seventeen-year-old in a small town in Arkansas, is forced to confront this problem both at home and in the military. This story is his, and to a degree, the stories of his family, his friends, and his comrades in combat. The problem is handled sympathetically, if realistically. [Compiler’s Note: Adoption connection is unclear, but I include it because it popped up on a subject search on Amazon.com].

Expecting Miracles. Linda U Howard. 1980. 259p. GP Putnam’s Sons. Expecting Miracles is an hilarious yet deeply affecting novel that answers the baby question with another question : what happens to the woman who has everything, when she is denied the one thing all woman take for granted.

Fabricator, The. Hollis Hodges. 1976. 183p. Crown Publishers. A beguiling lark of a novel about an eccentric young man, his six-year-old ward, and the lovely young woman who changes both their lives.

Falkner. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). 1837. 322p. Saunders & Otley. In Falkner Shelley once again emphasizes a father-daughter relationship, this time between an orphaned girl, Elizabeth Raby, and her rakish, Byronic guardian, Falkner. Haunted by a dark and mysterious past, Falkner is horrified to find that Elizabeth loves Gerard Neville, the son of the woman he once destroyed. The descriptions of Falkner’s guilt and the psychological tortures he inflicts upon himself and his daughter make the novel one of Shelley’s best works. Elizabeth, caught between her lover’s desire for revenge and her adoptive father’s secret obsession, becomes the link which ultimately enables all to live in domestic peace. Falkner is an appropriate finale to Mary Shelley’s novel writing as it encapsulates many of her concerns and uses her greatest novelistic strengths—the portrayal of an agonized hero struggling with himself, the conflicts created by love and domestic duty, the problem of the absent mother, the concept of fate and victimization, the Gothic terror of the unknown—elements she had dexterously manipulated and precociously displayed in the writing of Frankenstein nineteen years earlier. About the Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the only child of the famous radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. In 1814 she eloped with, and later married, Percy Bysshe Shelley. After his death in 1822 she returned to London where she pursued a professional writing career. Her most famous work is Frankenstein (1818), but she was author also of six other novels: Matilda (1819), Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). She also wrote for various magazines and journals (including the Westminster Review and the London Magazine). She wrote two works of travel-writing—History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) and Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the single most widely read work of the English Romantic period, yet the author’s other works—including five novels, two travel books, essays, and reviews—remain relatively unknown. Well received in their own era, they gained for Mary Shelley the reputation of an important, imaginative, and at times, controversial, author.

Fallen Angel. Don J Snyder. 2001. 224p. Pocket Books. Maudlin tale of a tragic accident on Christmas Eve. Years haven’t dimmed the memory of that awful night for Terry McQuinn, a handyman’s son from a small island off the coast of Maine. He’s never forgotten his humble origins, either, even though he’s now a million-dollar dealmaker in Hollywood. As a boy, he often helped his dad open up the vacation houses of the wealthy summer people. And one fateful winter afternoon, he went with rich Mr. Halworth and his daughter Katherine on a ride to the hospital. Mr. Halworth liked to dress up as Santa for the sick kids, dabbing whipped cream on their noses and telling a few jokes. But he lost control of his Cadillac on the ice, striking and killing a young woman and her baby. The memory haunts Terry still. And whatever happened to Katherine? He finds out when he comes back to Maine after his father’s death. It turns out that Mr. Halworth was a simple man at heart; in fact, what he really wanted was just to be a carpenter like Terry’s dad-a notion the ambitious, social-climbing Mrs. Halworth detested. The Halworths divorced after the accident and Mr. Halworth disappeared. Terry moved up in the world, though he’s still a thoughtful soul, given to musing on the meaning of it all. When he encounters Katherine (who is brave) and her adopted daughter Olivia (who is blind) out by the old house she’s inherited, he’s immediately smitten. There must be something he can do for this lovely single mother. ... Hey, how about finding her long-lost father? Even though Mr. Halworth is homeless and living on the streets of Boston, his sanity shattered, Terry manages to get him back to Maine just in time, saving daughter and granddaughter from the teeth of aterrible gale. Happiness of a sort awaits all. ... Melancholy soap from the author of Night Crossing (2001), etc., fraught with coincidence and banal philosophizing about nothing much. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright © 2001, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Fame. Karen Kingsbury. 2005. 354p. (Firstborn Series #1). Tyndale House Publishers. This is the first book in the soul-stirring new Firstborn series from Karen Kingsbury. As Dayne Matthews returns to Hollywood after his shocking discovery in Karen’s best-selling novel Reunion, he faces the dangerous world of fame and paparazzi. Meanwhile, Katy Hart receives the offer of a lifetime—starring opposite Dayne in a Hollywood film. Dayne and Jamie’s choices will change their hearts and lives forever. By the Same Author: Firstborn Series: Forgiven (#2); Found (#3); Family (#4); and Forever (#5).

Family. Karen Kingsbury. 2006. 342p. (Firstborn Series #4). Tyndale House Publishers. In the wake of finding his firstborn son, John Baxter looks for a way to tell his other children the truth about a secret he’s kept from them all their lives. At the same time, a sensational Hollywood trial brings Dayne Matthews and Katy Hart together again, this time in a very public way. Just when love might have the chance to win, doubts and presumed scandals place them farther apart than ever. In the midst of this crisis, the truth is clear for all of them: never has family been more important. By the Same Author: Firstborn Series: Fame (#1); Forgiven (#2); Found (#3); and Forever (#5).

Family Daughter, A. Maile Meloy. 2006. 336p. Scribner. From Kirkus Reviews: A thoroughly original and undeniably brilliant companion piece to Meloy’s debut novel, Saints and Liars (2003). Meloy returns to the Senterres, the Catholic California family full of piety, passion and secrets at the center of the earlier novel. This go-’round, the family’s passion and piety remain in place, but the secrets, and facts, have changed. The central character is now Yvette and Teddy Senterre’s granddaughter Abby. When Abby is barely seven, her self-centered, irresponsible mother Clarissa leaves Abby and Abby’s loving father Henry. Abby develops a crush on Uncle Jamie, Clarissa’s charming, much younger brother. After Henry dies unexpectedly while in college, Abby falls apart emotionally. She and Jamie, a semi-ne’er-do-well, have a brief incestuous affair. Afterwards, Jamie takes up with Saffron, a neurotic heiress with commitment issues. Abby becomes involved with a teaching assistant, Peter, and begins writing a novel. Meanwhile, she accompanies Jamie and Saffron to Argentina, where Saffron’s mother has adopted a Romanian orphan, T.J. When Saffron’s mother dies, T.J. turns out to have a mother still very much alive. Jamie then adopts T.J., marries his mother and brings them to California, and when T.J.’s mother disappears for good, Jamie becomes a devoted single father. Abby moves back with Peter and publishes a highly autobiographical novel. Because Abby has changed crucial factual information about who did what to whom, the Santerres tell themselves she has not exposed their secrets, but the book forces them to face deeper truths. Meloy juxtaposes Abby’s fictionalized account (Liars and Saints, described in enough detail for readers who have not read it) with the “reality” of this novel. And each novel stands alone; together they pack a seismic wallop.

Family Ties. Syrell Rogovin Leahy. 1982. 421p. Putnam. The saga of a woman torn between the man she loved and the man she could never forget. The novel revolves around the life of the heroine, as she is exiled from her Jewish family to pre-Hitler and then to Hitler’s Europe.

Fashionably Late: A Novel. Olivia Goldsmith. 1994. 431p. Harper Collins. All of designer Karen Kahn’s dreams seem to be coming true. She’s been honored with the fashion industry’s most coveted award, her marriage is thriving, and some very impressive money is being dangled in front of her in a proposed buyout. The only thing missing is that which she craves most—a baby. Then she receives the heartbreaking news that she will never be able to bear a child. it seems that although she has a designer label, she definitely doesn’t have designer genes. Karen becomes determined to find her own biological mother—a woman she has never known. But as if the doctor’s verdict has pulled a loose thread, Karen’s carefully stitched life begins to unravel, and she suddenly finds herself on the brink of losing her company, her husband, and the only family she has ever known. Now Karen must decide which of her dreams she still wants, because keeping them alive is going to be the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. About the Author: Olivia Goldsmith is the bestselling author of The First Wives Club, Flavor of the Month, Fashionably Late, The Bestsller, Marrying Mom,and Switcheroo. She lives in south Florida and is no longer young or a wife.

Fast Eddie, King of the Bees. Robert Arellano. 2001. 180p. Akashic Books. An abandoned child hustles on the streets of a dystopic, near-future Boston in the aftermath of the Great Devaluation—squatters have turned the tunnel system into an underground hive known as Dig City. In an elaborate search for his unknown parents, Eddie narrates through several levels of deception: street performer, pickpocket, adoptee, casino employee, and finally commander of the subterranean revolution. Fast Eddie is a convoluted Oedipal adventure blending low-brow scenarios with high-art diction, reminiscent of Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Edmund White. About the Author: Robert Arellano is a Cuban-American novelist and hypertext author teaching writing at Brown University. His stories have enjoyed favorable attention from New York Times Book Review and Associated Press. In 1996, Sonicnet published Arellano’s electronic book, Sunshine ’69. Arellano has lectured extensively on his groundbreaking work in hypertext and literary innovation. He offered the inaugural speech at the first Sundance Film Festival New Media Seminar and the keynote address at the 1999 European Cultural Capital Media Arts Symposium in Stockholm. Arellano’s essays on new directions in literature have been published in the User’s Guide to the Millennium, edited by Julio Ortega, and online at Feed magazine. Arellano has worked intensively with writers John Hawkes, Joe Ashby Porter, Paul West, Edmund White, and C.D. Wright; and has instructed fiction workshops at Brown with colleagues Ben Marcus and Carole Maso. He spends his breaks playing guitar for indie rock outfit Palace Brothers. He lives in Providence, RI.

Fast Forward. Judy Mercer. 1995. 352p. Pocket Books. The dream jolts her awake. In the hazy, gray glint of dawn, it leaves her feeling anxious, disconnected. Her memory has vanished. She doesn’t know if Ariel Gold—the name on a Los Angeles driver’s license —is hers. All she knows in her panic is that she is badly cut and bruised; she is in a house that has been viciously ransacked; and, on a crumpled heap of clothes, there is a blood-caked shirt, and a gun. In these gripping, nightmare moments, Judy Mercer’s Fast Forward propels us onto a surefire track of nonstop, page-turning suspense. Alone, completely disoriented, “Ariel” begins her search through a strange house and a stranger’s life, trying to find out who may be trying to harm her, and whom she can trust. She discovers that Ariel Gold has a vintage home, a classic car, a pedigreed dog, and a successful career as a producer for a television newsmagazine. She remembers none of them. Concealing her amnesia, she starts to improvise her life—moment by unpredictable moment. Back at work, Ariel uses all her ingenuity to grapple with a job she knows nothing about, aware that the friends, colleagues, and strangers she encounters may be sources of danger. Gradually, she uncovers a turbulent, painful past, and a present linked to the worlds of high-fashion modeling, the New York theater—and to murder. Those who knew the old Ariel are intrigued by her new persona, by subtle changes in the way she looks and acts—and the mystery around her deepens. With only her own wits to rely on, Ariel plunges from hope to despair and back again, as much an enigma to herself as she is to others. But someone is secretly watching her every move. The life she has inherited is no safe place to be...and her stubborn quest is leading her right into the sights of a killer.

Fathers in Law. Henry Cecil (1902-1976). 1965. 220p. Michael Joseph (UK). Although this book may be thought from its title to be a light-hearted legal romp, like its predeccessors Brothers in Law and Daughters in Law, it is a good deal more than that. A combination of tense drama and comedy on the subjects of the law and children and parents. From time to time the courts have heart-rendering decisions to make on child adoption. Here is this dramatic novel the court is in session hearing evidence and argument in a case of conflicting claims concerning a small boy. Published in the U.S. in 1966 as A Child Divided (Harper & Row). About the Author: Henry Cecil was the pseudonym of Judge Henry Cecil Leon. He was born in Norwood Green Rectory, near London, England. He was called to the Bar in 1923, and served with the British Army during the Second World War. Later, appointed a County Court Judge in 1949, he served in this capacity until 1967. The law and circumstances which surround it were the source for many of Cecil’s numerous short stories, books, plays, and radio and television adaptations of his work.

Fault Lines. Nancy Huston. 2007. 326p. McArthur & Co. Huston’s novel is a profound and poetic story that traces four generations of a single family from present-day California to WW II-era Germany. Fault Lines begins with Sol, a gifted, terrifying child whose mother believes he is destined for greatness partly because he has a birthmark like his dad, his grandmother, and his great-grandmother. When Sol’s family makes an unexpected trip to Germany, secrets begin to emerge about their history during World War II. It seems birthmarks are not all that’s been passed down through the bloodlines. Closely observed, lyrically told, and epic in scope, Fault Lines is a touching, fearless, and unusual novel about four generations of children and their parents. The story moves from the West Coast of the United States to the East, from Haifa to Toronto to Munich, as secrets unwind back through time until a devastating truth about the family’s origins is reached. Huston tells a riveting, vigorous tale in which love, music, and faith rage against the shape of evil.

Finding, The. Nina Bawden. 1958. 153p. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co. Alex doesn’t know his birthday, so instead of a birthday he celebrates his Finding. Alex liked to hear the story of his Finding, how he was discovered as a baby wrapped in an old and matted shawl, in the arms of the Sphinx that guards Cleopatra’s Needle on the banks of London’s Thames River. When he was very young, even though he knew she wasn’t his real mother, he liked to visit the Sphinx and tell her about the happy things he did with his adopted parents and his big sister Laura. Being found can make you special, different, even—in a way—important. But it can also make you insecure. Alex is happy to have a mysterious history, but overnight his world turns upside down when, eleven years after his Finding, his story becomes headline news once again. When an unexpected inheritance threatens to change his life with his adopted family, Alex runs away from home.

Finding Noel. Richard Paul Evans. 2006. 320p. Simon & Schuster. The Christmas season is supposed to be full of joy, but not for Mark Smart. Life had dealt him one blow after another until one snowy November night, when he finds a beautiful young woman who will change his life forever. Macy Wood has little memory of her birth parents, and memories she’d rather forget of her adopted home. A Christmas ornament inscribed with the word “Noel” is the only clue to the little sister she only vaguely remembers, a clue that will send her and Mark on a journey to reclaim her past, and her family.

Finishing Touches, The. Hester Browne. 2009 416p. Simon & Schuster. Twenty-seven years ago, an infant turned up on the Academy’s doorstep, with a note tacked to her blanket by an elegant golden brooch—Please take care of my baby. I want her to grow up to be a proper lady. Loved by Lady Frances Phillimore and her kindhearted staff, Betsy grew up aspiring to be an Academy girl. But when Franny and her husband, Lord Phillimore, advise Betsy to instead hone her considerable math skills at college, she brokenheartedly leaves behind the only family she’s known. Now, on the sad occasion of Lady Frances’s memorial service, Betsy comes back to find the school in disrepair, the enrollment down, and Lord P. desperate to save his legacy. Enter Betsy, the numbers genius, and her business plan—to replace dusty protocol with the essentials girls need today: cell phone etiquette, eating sushi properly, handling credit cards, choosing the perfect little black dress, negotiating a pre-nup, and other lessons in independent living. But Betsy may have bitten off more than she can chew. Can she win over the school’s snobby headmistress and its handsome but risk-averse treasurer? Returning to London also means facing her own unfinished business, as she crosses paths with her sexy girlhood crush...and blowing the dust off clues to a lifelong mystery: who were her parents, and why did they abandon her? If knowledge is power, Betsy is on the brink of truly becoming her own woman, and embracing the one thing she’s wanted all along: a place to call home. A bittersweet journey of laughter and tears, The Finishing Touches will have you gleefully turning pages through dinner with elbows on the table—bad manners, perhaps, but excusable for one utterly irresistible read. About the Author: Hester Browne is the New York Times bestselling author of The Little Lady Agency; Little Lady, Big Apple; and The Little Lady Agency and the Prince. Born in England, she read English at Trinity College, Cambridge. A devotee of Scottish reeling, vintage-clothes hunting, and cryptic crosswords, she lives in London and Herefordshire with her Basset hound Violet. Visit her at www.simonandschuster.com/hesterbrowne.

Finding Laura Buggs. Stanley Gordon West.1999. 277p. Lexington-Marshall. A companion novel to Until They Bring The Streetcars Back, Stanley West takes the reader back to the same neighborhoods, with some of his beloved characters, to 1949 Saint Paul/Minneapolis—those memorable days of corner grocery stores, big-band music, burning leaves and filling stations that check the oil and wash the windshield. On this nostalgic canvas West has set his riveting and heartwarming novel, the devastating story of young Sandy Meyer. Bright and outgoing, having grown up through the Great Depression and the World War II years, she is suddenly given one perplexing clue to her past that sets her on an incredible and harrowing journey in search of her lost family, a pilgrimage that brings her face to face with nerve-shattering suspense, unbearable terror and the magnificent capacity of the human heart. Surrounded by juicy and wacky characters, and without the knowledge of her adoptive parents, her devil-may-care friends, or the boy she desperately loves, she summons the courage to doggedly follow where the faint trail leads. When she stumbles upon the buried past and long-hidden treachery, she is confronted by an evil that knows her by name and drawn into a darkness she never knew existed. Tenaciously refusing to quit, she discovers a heartbreaking heroism and an extraordinary triumph that changes her life forever. About the Author: Stanley West was born in Saint Paul, the third in a family of four children. He grew up attending the city’s public schools and getting around riding the streetcars. He graduated from Central High School in 1950. He attended Macalester College and the University of Minnesota, earning a degree in history and geology in 1955. He moved from the Midwest to Montana in 1964 where he raised a large family and he has lived there ever since. His novel Amos was produced as a CBS Movie of the Week starring Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Montgomery and Dorothy McGuire and was nominated for four Emmys.

Fire Sale. Robert Klane. 1975. 179p. Atheneum. You will meet the most incredible people in this outrageously funny novel of an outrageous family. Jacob, a/k/a Papa. He owns a failing department store, which he plans to have burned down by a lifelong friend, who happens to be insane. Ruth, a/k/a Mama. A Very spaced-out lady, She lives in her own world and her idea of a social evening is to throw a small funeral, say for thirty people. Ezra, the eldest son. A total failure at being a basketball coach. Then he spots a black street-court player who is phenomenal, whom he adopts. Harry, the younger son. A nebbish whose dream is to get into a shiksa’s good graces as soon as possible. Herma, the duaghter. No beauty she. As a child she was mistaken for a monkey by the local organ grinder. Basis for a 1977 Alan Arkin film of the same name, with a screenplay by the author. [Pictured: paperback edtion]

Fire Sermon. Wright Morris. 1971. 155p. Harper & Row. The story of a 12-year-old orphan boy, and his 82-year-old uncle, who take a trip across Middle America in an ancient Maxwell coupe. An allegory as well as a sermon. A chance meeting on the highway links a hippie couple to the eastward journey of the old man and the boy. The ceremony of the old giving way to the new, the young breaking away from what is old, may well be the one constant in the ceaseless flux of American life. Fire Sermon reenacts this ceremony in the entangled lives of three young people and one old man. A chance meeting on the highway links a hippie couple to the eastward journey of an old man and a boy. For the boy it is a daily drama testing and questioning his allegiance. To which world does he belong? To the familiar ties and affections of the old or the disturbing and alluring charms of the new? Their destination is a point on the plains where the past proves to be buried. The irresistable forces that shape our lives, and expand or shrink our horizons, are sometimes, as in this novel, revealed in people and events of small moment, torn between what is passing and what they feel is emerging. About the Author: One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

Fires of Edgarville, The. Craig Joseph Danner. 2009. 256p. Crispin/Hammer Publishing. Hank Davenport is a man in search of his life. Born just days after the first anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he is a Japanese-American raised in the Pacific Northwest by Caucasian parents. A respected and successful pediatrician, his reputation is destroyed when he is accused of mercy-killing a young patient. Seeking refuge on his adoptive mother’s remote and dilapidated orchard, Hank discovers that she is rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Long an outcast from her Mormon family, Myrna herself has only recently returned to the now-failed homestead her father and brothers built and planted when she was a child. As her dementia progresses, her long-held secrets are revealed, and Hank becomes entwined in the mystery of a phantom arsonist plaguing a community that holds the slowly turning key to his past and his future. Tracing the evolution of a small Oregon lumber town and its connection to the Japanese internment during World War II, The Fires of Edgarville is a spellbinding story told with authentic detail and unexpected humor. Craig Danner’s second novel is fast-paced and unflinching in its honesty, while filled with compassion for its original and endearing characters. About the Author: Craig Danner’s first novel, Himalayan Dhaba, won the 2002 Pacific Northwest Book Award. He lives in his native Oregon with his wife and two sons, who are encouraging him to write a children’s novel.

U.S. 1st Ed.

U.K. 1st Ed.

First Light. Peter Ackroyd. 1989. 328p. Grove Press. From Publishers Weekly: The discovery of a neolithic grave site on the Devon-Dorset attracts an assortment of archeologists, astronomers and indigenous characters. Each has his own agenda, from archeologist Mark Clare, hoping to prove a maverick theory, to Joey Hanover, a show-biz character who happens along in search of his roots. Astronomer Damien Fall may have discovered something astonishing, and the exceedingly peculiar Farmer Mint and his idiot savant son, Boy Mint, may hold more cards in this game than anyone knows. The novel is carefully imbued with several ominous portents that lead nowhere, but the tone is so deliciously creepy that it doesn’t matter. Ackroyd’s sly humor is beguiling; he has given some of the best lines to a lesbian couple and Joey’s malaprop wife. (“Look at those kikes,” Florey Hanover was saying to her husband. “Dressed like Winston Churchill.” “Dykes, dear.”) Silliness and illumination fit together perfectly in this amusing, eccentric and provocative novel. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fish Can Sing, The. Halldór Laxness. Translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson. 1966. Methuen (UK). Story of Alfgrim, a boy who was abandoned by his mother at an early age, who grows up with his grandparents on the outskirts of Reykjavik at the beginning of the 20th century in a fisherman’s hut in Iceland.

Flamingo Rising, The. Larry Baker. 1997. 309p. Knopf. From Kirkus Reviews: Give newcomer Baker points for audacity: He sets out to write a novel that’s a highly original coming-of-age tale, a story of warring families, a mediation on the complex nature of familial affection, and a tale of matricide—among other things. And, in at least some of his intentions, he succeeds. Abraham Issac Lee, the son of a turbulent, wealthy, deeply eccentric southerner, is looking back at his childhood in the relatively benign precincts of 1950s and ’60s Florida. His father settles there after the Korean War, and decides to build a drive-in theater featuring the world’s largest outdoor screen. He does so, with the help of a believably odd crew of helpers. The drive-in, vast, gaudy, is an immediate success. The downside is that Lee has chosen to build it in proximity to a large, elegant funeral home, and the two patriarchs begin a long, increasingly nasty battle to see who’ll dominate the neighborhood. Matters become even more complicated when a teenage Abe falls in love with Grace, the funeral director’s only daughter, even as he’s being pursued by a rather enigmatic woman who’s quietly assumed the management of the drive-in. This would likely be sufficient plot for many writers, but Baker wants more, and he deftly interweaves storylines involving the question of identity and family (Abe and his sister, both adopted, are Korean), the way in which public dramas (here, everything from the Cold War to the death of JFK) impact on private lives, and on love’s crippling power. The novel’s strengths are its set-pieces: Abe’s gentle courtship of Grace, a rowdy, comic Fourth of July celebration, and, on a far grimmer note, the fiery end of the drive-in and Abe’s innocence. The problem is that there’s simply too much here—too many contending storylines and moods crowding each other out. This is, at times, a truly affecting work, and an inventive one, but too clamorous in its parts to be a complete success. © 1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Floodmakers, The. Mylene Dressler. 2004. 192p. Penguin Group. From Kirkus Reviews: Third novel from Dressler (The Deadwood Beetle, 2001, etc.), a portrait of domestic angst set in a Texas beach house during a family reunion. Dee Buelle is a crusty old bastard. A famous playwright and a wealthy man to boot, he lost his parents when he was just a boy and his first wife not long after she had borne his second child. Second wife Jean, a professional golfer who used to tour with Babe Zaharias, raised the two kids in the shadow of fame and the lap of luxury, but now they’re all grown up: Harry lives in New York and is trying to establish his own career as a playwright; Sarah, married to filmmaker Paul, is trying to produce a documentary about her father. They get together at the beach house at Jean’s request. Dee, now in his 80s, has stopped taking his heart medication, and she’s worried about him. So the kids fly in and try to act as natural as they can. Like many a family reunion, however, this one has a lot simmering beneath the surface. Narrator Harry, now in his 30s, wants to tell his father he’s gay, though he suspects Dee knows already. Sarah, having failed at a variety of professions and causes, has a chip on her shoulder about her career and wants Dee to cooperate with Paul to help boost his film; she also plans to adopt a baby from Bosnia instead of having one of her own and is spoiling to pick a fight with Dee about this as well. Poor Jean, caught in the crossfire, tries to play the peacemaker-until she discovers an appalling fact about her marriage. Somewhat stagy in its composition, with a heavily dialogue-driven narrative, but the baroque Tennessee Williams flavor rescues the plot from its own melodramas.

Floor of the Sky, The. Pamela Carter Joern. 2006. 256p. University of Nebraska Press. From Kirkus Reviews: A small-scale but emotionally rich first novel about an unwed pregnant teen spending the summer with her grandmother in the hardscrabble Nebraska Sandhills. Lila’s flight-attendant mother sends Lila from Minneapolis to her grandmother Toby’s Nebraska farm to wait out the last months of her unwanted pregnancy. While Lila struggles with her pregnancy and her decision to put her unborn baby up for adoption, her visit stirs up long-simmering tensions for Toby, Toby’s bitter sister Gertie and George, who has worked on the farm for more than 50 years. Seventy-two and long widowed, Toby is no fawning grandma. Tough but loving, she still rides her horse regularly and can work up a man’s passions. It soon comes to light that although he never acted on his feelings, Gertie’s husband, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, was quietly in love with Toby for most of his marriage . . . not exactly a recipe for good sibling relations. Also in love with Toby long, long ago was George’s younger brother, David. When Toby was Lila’s age, she and David tried to run away together. Her father chased them in his car, shot and killed David, then crashed the car, accidentally killing his wife. Toby bore David’s child, who was cared for by distant relatives until he died at 12 of leukemia. Since then, George has secretly acted as Toby’s guardian angel, even through her happy marriage and the adoption of Lila’s mother. His unspoken love makes for irresistible reading. Despite Lila’s small romances and dramas, her story never rises to the dramatic or romantic energy of these oldsters (think Paul Newman with Joanne Woodward). Toward the end, the plot wobbles as the author recognizes, but only partially deflates, the clicheinherent in having a mortgage-holder show up, threatening to sell the farm out from under Toby. A resonant love story, whatever the age of the lovers.

Flower For Catherine, A. Frank Swinnerton. 1950. 295p. Hutchinson (UK).

Flowering Thorn, The. Marjorie Sharp. 1933. 314p. A Barker, Ltd (UK). What happens when a young woman, active and socially prominent, decides to adopt a child, who then starts to become the center of her life, and requires changes she never thought to make? [Pictured: U.S. editions]

Flutist & the Dancer, The. Marilyn R Stark. 2000. 246p. Denlingers Publishers, Limited. This novel is set in the 1940s and 1950s, in a Christian farming atmosphere in rural northwest Ohio. Clutching her doll and nursery-rhyme book, six-year-old Shannon begins her life at this Children’s Home the morning her Grandmother leads her through the front door of the Main Building and leaves without saying goodbye. A generally obedient girl, Shannon quickly adjusts to: “her personal” number marked or stitched on each item assigned to her—the prospect of eating meals with eighty people—playing and sleeping with eighteen little girls and dealing with the intimidating Bully Bramble. How will Shannon find her twin brother, her nanny or grandmother when she can’t even remember the name of the town where she previously lived? She questions why her name and birthday were changed but assumes it is just part of the Children’s Home routine. Shannon is seated at the same table with ten-year-old David at breakfast the day of her arrival. They have an off-and-on romance throughout the story. Shannon’s continual search for her family and curiosity as to who the flutist is—snowballs. The results? Intriguing!

Fly Away Home. Judith Kelman. 1996. 288p. Bantam. Everyone on Rand’s Island said Eva Haskel was crazy; ever since the well-publicized, unsolved kidnapping of her baby, she has been a tragic figure on the small island off the Connecticut coast, wildly mourning the child who mysteriously vanished six long years ago. But soon a shocking twist of fate—and a very determined young woman—will come into Eva’s dark world, to bring her son home at last... Bethany Logan is a spirited teacher at Hinsdale, a private boys’ school in a small New Hampshire town. Single, unsettled, and best friends with her protective dog, Aunt Sadie, she has a unique gift for teaching children with learning disabilities. She understands their special needs and makes even the toughest challenges fun. In return, her students adore her. Except for Pip Stafford, a moody troublemaker and son of the school’s headmaster, handsome but chilly Adam Stafford. Determined to solve Pip’s behavior problems, Bethany confronts the boy’s father—only to be given a quick brush-off and a frightening glimpse of Stafford’s temper. Going even farther out on a limb, she makes a late-night raid into the school’s administrative files, but they reveal nothing. Bethany is ready to give up her quest to find a way to reach the boy when a chance detail in an old poorly focused photo leads her to unearth his true identity.

Forever. Karen Kingsbury. 2007. 300p. (Firstborn Series #5). Tyndale House Publishers. By the Same Author: Firstborn Series: Fame (#1); Forgiven (#2); Found (#3); and Family (#4).

Forgiven. Karen Kingsbury. 2005. 358p. (Firstborn Series #2). Tyndale House Publishers. A-list Hollywood actor Dayne Matthews wrestles with the shocking information he learned about his past in Karen’s bestselling novel Reunion. Now Dayne must come to terms with the reality of his situation and find both forgiveness and family along the way. By the Same Author: Firstborn Series: Fame (#1); Found (#3); Family (#4); and Forever (#5).

Forgotten Garden, The. Kate Morton. 2009. 560p. Atria. A tiny girl is abandoned on a ship headed for Australia in 1913. She arrives completely alone with nothing but a small suitcase containing a few clothes and a single book—a beautiful volume of fairy tales. She is taken in by the dockmaster and his wife and raised as their own. On her twenty-first birthday they tell her the truth, and with her sense of self shattered and with very little to go on, “Nell” sets out on a journey to England to try to trace her story, to find her real identity. Her quest leads her to Blackhurst Manor on the Cornish coast and the secrets of the doomed Mountrachet family. But it is not until her granddaughter, Cassandra, takes up the search after Nell’s death that all the pieces of the puzzle are assembled. At Cliff Cottage, on the grounds of Blackhurst Manor, Cassandra discovers the forgotten garden of the book’s title and is able to unlock the secrets of the beautiful book of fairy tales. This is a novel of outer and inner journeys and an homage to the power of storytelling. The Forgotten Garden is filled with unforgettable characters who weave their way through its spellbinding plot to astounding effect. Morton’s novels are #1 bestsellers in England and Australia and are published in more than twenty languages. Her first novel, The House at Riverton, was a New York Times bestseller. About the Author: Kate Morton, a native Australian, holds degrees in dramatic art and English literature and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland. She lives with her family in Brisbane, Australia, and is writing her third novel.

Fortunate Child, A. Elizabeth Wix. 2008. 357p. Lulu.com. Set in England and Germany between 1936 and the present, A Fortunate Child tells the story of the two mothers of the same child. Based on a true story, the novel explores adoption from three viewpoints—the “fortunate child” of the title, the birth mother and the adoptive one.

Fortune’s Daughter. Alice Hoffman. 1985. 268p. Putnam. Rae Perry is young, unmarried, and far from home as she awaits the birth of her first child—accompanied by the angry, moody man she’s loved since high school. Lila Grey is a fortune-teller with no interest in the future, a mother who lost her daughter long ago, on a cold, cold day. Now, as these two women meet, it is earthquake weather in California —when animals panic, friends and lovers quarrel, ice cubes dissolve in the palm of your hand. [Pictured at Right: First British Edition]

Found. Karen Kingsbury. 2006. 342p. (Firstborn Series #3). Tyndale House Publishers. John Baxter hires a private invstigator to fulfill his wife’s dying wish—that they find their firstborn son and make him part of the Baxter family. Meanwhile top Hollywood actor Dayne Matthews undergoes a personal search for truth despite great loss, and Christian Kids Theater director Katy Hart makes a decision that could take her from the simple life she has grown to love. By the Same Author: Firstborn Series: Fame (#1); Forgiven (#2); Family (#4); and Forever (#5).

Fourth Grace, The. Jimmy Goldfarb. 2009. 194p. CreateSpace. A retired schoolteacher becomes her college lover’s literary executor twenty-five years after he published a novel about their affair—and then dropped out of her life and out of sight. His unfinished manuscripts force her to confront the child she gave up for adoption, her muse of poetry, the tangle of memory and fiction, the power of forgiveness, and the meaning of love.

Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. Binjamin Wilkomirski. Translated by Carol Brown Juneway. 1996. 155p. Schocken. When Framents was first published, it received worldwide acclaim for the author’s harrowing account of his World War II-era childhood as the orphaned son of Latvian Jews who were killed in Hitler’s “final solution." Wilkomirski described having himself survived interment in Polish concentration camps and the subsequent indignity of being adopted by a Catholic family who tried to suppress his memories and change his identity. The book received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award, among other accolades, and Wilkomirski established himself as a respected expert on the Holocaust. By 2000, however, Wilkomirski’s story had been revealed for the work of fiction that it was: he was neither Jewish nor Latvian, and he had never been in an Nazi death camp. His real name was Bruno Grosjean. He had been born in 1941 to an unwed mother, placed in an orphanage and and adopted in 1945 by a well-to-do Swiss family, from whom he received a substantial inheritance in 1986, Wilkomirski, for his part, never admitted the hoax, even after publication of a scathing report by Stefan Maechler, an historian hired by Schocken, his American publisher, to investigate the author’s claims. All publishers eventually withdrew Fragments from circulation, so no new copies are available; however, the full text of the original book was republished by Schocken in 2001, along with the full report of investigator Maechler, under the title The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth. Anyone interested in reading further regarding this notorious literary hoax are also directed to A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski by Blake Eskin. Compiler’s Note: I have included this title as a work of fiction (which it is), both because of it’s obvious adoption-related content, and the author’s own apparent personal history as an adoptee.

Frank Fowler, the Cash Boy. Horatio Alger (1832-1899). 1887. AL Burt. Frank Fowler, 16, is left to support himself and his little sister, Grace, after their mother dies. Before her death, she tells Frank that he’s not really her son, explaining that he was left to her by a mysterious stranger many years earlier. Frank is stunned by this news and hopes he can someday solve the mystery. Meanwhile, he places his sister in the care of a neighbor, and journeys to New York to find a job. He secures work with a firm, but cannot get by on his scanty salary. Fortunately, he meets a benefactor, Mr. Wharton, who hires him as a reader, paying him liberally. Mr. Wharton’s nephew, John Wade, long ago told him that his son died of a fever in Havana. Wharton finds himself drawn to Frank because he resembles his son. Wade tried to dispose of Frank in order to make himself the sole heir of the Wharton fortune, so when Wade recognizes Frank, he conspires to get rid of Frank again. Frank must fight for his identity and his very life. About the Author: Horatio Alger, Jr., was one of the most influential and prolific American authors of the 19th century, who wrote more than a hundred books on the same theme: that honesty, cheerfulness, virtue, thrift, and hard work would be rewarded with success. While his plots and dialogue sometimes lacked creativity, he can be credited with helping to create an uniquely American philosophy, convincing generations that they could triumph over their circumstances and become an Alger Hero. (Pictured paperback edition available from Polyglot Press)

Free Fall of Webster Cummings, The. Tom Bodett. 1996. 336p. Hyperion. Bodett, of Motel 6 commercial and NPR fame, author of collections of homespun vignettes such as The End of the Road (1989), offers a flawed but often moving first novel. Webster Cummings, a Boston statistician, falls from an airplane over New Hampshire but happens to land in perfect tandem with the angle of a ski slope. He slides into the valley below and uphill again, then is catapulted to his feet like some sort of superhero. This near-death experience causes Webster to reassess his thus far inconsequential life: An adoptee, he becomes obsessed with finding his real mother and father. From this grand and amusing, if unlikely, premise, Bodett begins peeling away layers of mystery, beginning in Alaska with a teenaged couple banned by a cruel old patriarch for sleeping together out of wedlock, then to Ohio, Indiana, Seattle, and the fruit country of north-central Oregon—where most of the story is set. No doubt about it, Bodett loves his small-town folk and does them beautifully: a fragile, naive Ohio couple who trade in their home for a gas-guzzling RV and go visit the children who don’t want to see them; a dreamy, homeless man who wanders the Seattle waterfront, reporting for his various “jobs”; a heavy equipment operator who loses his arm in an accident, drifts toward alcoholism, and finds redemption in bringing to life a failed peach orchard. Just as often, Bodett is a masterful light satirist: His portrait of a bicoastal yuppie couple having their first baby is a scream. When it comes to plotting, however, Bodett is a third-rate Dickens, relying on contrivance and coincidence to bring his huge cast together. So the only reason to read him is his people, who break your heart. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Free to Love. Ivana Trump. 1993. Pocket Books. Plucky Czech socialite Katrinka Graham returns, this time juggling a fleet of hotels, a new marriage, a late pregnancy, a social life in St. Moritz, Palm Beach, New York, and London, a surly son, and a lethal ex-husband—all of which give her only an occasional moment to mutter philosophically, “Ay yi yi yi, what a world.” Having finally rid herself of hateful Wasp spouse Adam Graham, lovely 43-year-old former model Katrinka settles down with her handsome, rich new husband—self-made newspaper magnate Mark van Hollen—in a freshly redecorated Manhattan townhouse complete with a nursery suite for their soon-to-arrive baby girl. Pregnant, in love, owner of a successful luxury hotel business and surrounded by affectionate high-society friends, Katrinka wishes only to share her happiness with the rest of the world, but, sadly, the rest of the world has other ideas. Ex-husband Adam, furious that Katrinka, who failed to bear him an heir, has so easily become pregnant with Mark, plots to destroy both her marriage and her husband’s publishing empire. Katrinka, who has just located Christian Heller, the 23-year-old son she gave up for adoption when young and single in Czechoslovakia, is too busy showering Christian with a Mercedes, a Central Park West apartment, a job in Mark’s company, and introductions to friends’ children to note the warning signs in Adam’s behavior—or, for that matter, in Christian’s, as the brilliant but unsavory young man responds to her overtures with insults and betrayals. The world is filled with jackals, in short, and Katrinka and Mark must watch their step, steadfastly sticking by each other in the face of the boldfaced lies, media harassment, marital separations, SEC investigations, kidnapping, rape, blackmail, spontaneous cosmetic restructuring, and worse that come their way. Ay yi yi yi, what a world. Yet Trump’s practical, optimistic heroine beguiles the reader even as her glitzy, international milieu dazzles and entertains. — From Kirkus Reviews; ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Here to Maternity. Sinéad Moriarty. 2006. 297p. Penguin Ireland. This work is a delicious, funny and touching final installment of Emma Hamilton’s struggles to become a mother. Just as Emma and her husband James become parents of eight-month-old Russian baby, Yuri, they also find out that Emma is pregnant. Emma discovers that having her dreams come true brings a whole new set of problems as she is faced with well-meaning friends and family—and not-so-well-meaning maternity nazis—telling her how to be a mother. Only her wonderful calm long-suffering husband, a mad family that makes her look like the down-to-earth sensible one, and fantastic friends whose lives are even crazier than her own, keep Emma from losing it, and in the end she comes through with her usual mix of humour, good-natured hysteria and real heart. About the Author: Sinéad Moriarty’s debut novel, The Baby Trail, was an Irish and UK bestseller and has been published in fifteen other countries. Her second novel, A Perfect Match, was published in August 2005 to wide acclaim. After a decade living in Paris and London, Dubliner Sinéad moved back to her native city with her husband in 2003. She has a one-year-old son, Hugo, and is expecting a second baby in February 2006. By the Same Author: The Baby Trail (2004) and The Right Fit (2006).

Fup. Jim Dodge. 1983. 59p. City Miner Books. Between these covers reside a twenty pound duck that won’t fly, thirty miles of barbed-wire fencing, and several batches of illicit whiskey. Fup is a classic tale that celebrates all the amazing connections and pitfalls of rustic living. The story is set in the coastal hills of northern California between 1880 and the present. The plot revolves around Grandaddy Jake Santee who believes he is immortal, his orphan grandson Tiny whose passion is building masterfully crafted fences even though they don’t have any stock, and Fup, a hen mallard with a prodigious appetite. These three come together in a transcendent tale that has won international acclaim and the affection of thousands of readers. Author Photo © 1984 Ron Shuman.

Gardens in the Dunes. Leslie Marmon Silko. 1999. 309p. Simon & Schuster. In a novel that moves with extraordinary fluidity and grace between two diametrically opposed worlds—the timeless, “traditional” world of Native American peoples and the elaborate, stylized world of European and American upper-class culture at its glittering, falsely glamorous zenith before the First World War—Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of such highly praised works of fiction as Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, has written what Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, calls “a little masterpiece.” With the sure hand and unerring eye of a mature artist, Silko takes the reader on a Grand Tour of England and Europe in the era of Henry James (in a novel peopled with characters whose sensibility and language are brilliantly Jamesian), as seen through the eyes of a young Native American girl, Indigo, who is in flight from the destruction at the hands of the whites of her own tribal world. Indigo’s fascination with the world of luxury and privilege never eclipses her instinctive faith in the traditions and the culture of her own people, or her desire to return home to what remains of her tribe and her family. Spanning the jungles of Brazil, the gardens and stately homes of England and Europe, the desert of the American Southwest, and the great estates of the American rich at the height of the Gilded Age, Gardens in the Dunes is an ambitious, fully realized novel about the fatal collision between two cultures, that of the colonizers and that of the indigenous peoples they have conquered, and about the ideas, beliefs, and structures of time, mind, and habit that bind and sunder them. At the heart of the book is Indigo herself—a young child of the Sand Lizard people, who runs away from the government school to which the soldiers have taken her to be brought up in the ways of the white world. Until then, Indigo and her sister, Sister Salt, have lived with their grandmother, Grandma Fleet, a last, tiny remnant of a tribe that has been driven from its home among the garden terraces carved out of the sand dunes, and so reduced that Grandma Fleet and the girls have fallen from selling handmade baskets to tourists at the railway station to scavenging from the town dump. Yet they have not lost their tribal identity or their faith in the coming of a Messiah who will return to their people—perhaps to all the Indian peoples—their land, and whose coming is sought by means of the Ghost Dance, which has been strictly forbidden by government. Hattie, Indigo’s kindhearted and determined rescuer, is herself something of rebel. Married to Edward, an older man, wealthy, well-connected, a much-traveled gentleman-scholar, botanist, and explorer who nurses complex schemes for making a vast fortune with exotic plants. Hattie has defied the prevailing Victorian standards for young ladies by pursuing her own career as a scholar (she is something of a bluestocking) and by not producing an heir. In Indigo, Hattie finds at once a cure for her own loneliness and lack of love (for Edward, however well-intentioned, is at best a diffident, remote, and unpassionate husband) and a new object of study. Kind, observant, optimistic, full of good intentions, Hattie methodically sets about transforming Indigo, whose high spirits and native intelligence soon re-emerge into a “proper,” well-brought-up American child, a transformation that is doomed to fail, for Indigo’s view of the world is very different from Hattie’s. In the end, by small degrees, they (and we) begin to understand that Hattie has at least as much to learn from the child as the child does from her—perhaps more. Gardens in the Dunes builds to a rich and unexpected climax in which Hattie finds herself reduced to poverty, thrown out of the society in which she has always lived so comfortably (however much she chafed at its rules), and is herself rescued by Indigo’s people at the precise moment when the Ghost Dance is sweeping through the pueblos and reservations of the Indian peoples of the Southwest, bringing relationships between them and the whites to a new and dangerous level of tension. Satisfying, multifaceted, wise, and compassionate, Gardens in the Dunes is cause for celebration—a major novel by perhaps the most gifted and best-known of Native American writers today.

Gate at the Stairs, A. Lorrie Moore. 2009. 336p. Knopf. In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss. Now, in her dazzling new novel—her first in more than a decade—Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love. As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes” are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed. This long-awaited new novel by one of the most heralded writers of the past two decades is lyrical, funny, moving, and devastating; Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date—textured, beguiling, and wise. About the Author: Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Birds of America, Like Life, and Self-Help and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Gathering Home. Vicki Covington. 1988. 240p. Simon & Schuster. From Publishers Weekly: Eschewing anger, hostility and resentment, Covington writes a thoroughly credible, appealing story of an adopted teenager’s coming to terms with her birth and adoptive parents. Whitney Gaines’s adoptive father Cal is a liberal-minded minister in Birmingham, Ala., whose particular mission is the Sanctuary movement. Cal and his wife Mary Ellen are modern believers who have adapted their ’60s idealism to the demands of the next decades. Always open with Whitney about her adoption, they are encouraging when she tells them she’d like to investigate the circumstances of her birth. Just as Cal decides to run for a Congressional seat the following year, Whitney begins to correspond with Sam, her birth father, a cartoonist who lives with his lover Aaron in New York; her birth mother doesn’t answer her letters. During the year of the campaign, Whitney grows close to Cal’s campaign manager, Nat; she also writes to Sam’s mother Eva, who is overjoyed to discover that she has a grandchild. Finally Whitney invites Sam and Aaron to visit Cal’s church in November, before going with them to Selma to meet Eva. In the course of this quiet, compelling story, Whitney finds there is room in her heart for both her families. With Nat she learns that she might experience love as an adult, and from her birth mother she learns she will not be overwhelmed by rejection. Subtle and affirming, Covington’s first novel is filled with memorable characters who make ordinary goodness seem both accessi ble and desirable. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Generosity of Women, The: A Novel. Courtney Eldridge. 2009. 368p. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. From Kirkus Reviews: Short-story author Eldridge (Unkempt, 2005) gives distinctive voice to six very different characters in her challenging debut novel. Joyce is a curator whose abrasive personality is a perfect match for her provocative art shows. Elegant, beautiful Bobbie, her first-year roommate at Barnard, is now a gynecologist and still Joyce’s best friend. Bobbie’s patient Lisa, Joyce’s aggrieved ex-assistant, is adjusting to life as a banker’s wife, mother and reformed bad girl. Lisa’s sister Lynne is her temperamental opposite. Lynne’s teenage daughter Jordan, who has always been fascinated by her aunt’s wild ways, is now in trouble herself. Then there’s Adela, Bobbie’s adopted daughter and Joyce’s goddaughter, a young woman whose close relationship with her mother might not survive a big revelation. Each character has a story to tell, and it’s not entirely easy to keep track of these intersecting first-person narratives. Eldridge does not use any typological signs to designate dialogue, and she employs an elliptical style that forces the reader to approach each woman’s story from the outside. It takes a while to fully grasp the various overlapping conflicts that compel the plot, but readers willing to do the work will be rewarded with a rich, emotionally and intellectually engaging experience. Eldridge’s craft enhances the verisimilitude—quotation marks and long passages of exposition tend not to occur in real life—and there’s something exciting about a book that combines technical daring with concerns generally relegated to the nongenre known as “women’s fiction.” The author takes her characters seriously, she takes her work seriously, and she takes her audience seriously too. Brave and accomplished.

Gentian Hill. Elizabeth Goudge. 1949. 444p. Hodder & Stoughton (UK). A novel of Devon in the days of Nelson, with stirring adventure at sea with Nelson’s Fleet, danger and squalor in the streets of early 19th-century London, a living child taken from the arms of her dead mother after a shipwreck. About the Author: Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge was born on April 24, 1900 in Wells, Somerset, where her father was Principal of Wells Theological College. Although she had privately intended writing as a career, her parents insisted she taught handicrafts in Oxford. She began writing in her spare time and her first novel, Island Magic, set in Guernsey, was a great success in England and, subsequently, in America. Green Dolphin Country (1944) projected her to fame, netting a Literary Guild Award and a special prize of £30,000 from Louis B. Mayer of MGM before being filmed. In her later years Elizabeth Goudge settled in Henley-on-Thames. She died on April 1, 1984.

Saturday Review Press Edition, 1972

Dell Paperback Edition, 1973

Gentle Greaves. Ernest Raymond. 1949. 534p. Cassell (UK). To a large bombed house in a London square comes an elderly man and a young woman. The neighbours are surprised by their arrival, as the man appears to be wealthy. They learn he is retired publisher Sir Theodore Allan Mourne and she his adopted daughter, the child of a doctor killed in the First World War and a girl long dead whose name was Greaves.

Gesture Life, A. Chang-Rae Lee. 1999. 356p. Riverhead. From Publishers Weekly: Franklin Hata, born to Korean parents, raised by an adoptive family in Japan and settled in America, is the narrator of Lee’s quietly stunning second novel. Like his first, the Hemingway/PEN award-winning Native Speaker, it is a resonant story of an outsider striving to become part of an alien culture. Beloved in the small, wealthy suburban New York community where for more than 30 years he ran a surgical supply store, “Doc” Hata lives a stringently circumspect life designed to afford him privacy and respect. Never married, he adopts a young girl of mixed parentage from a Japanese orphanage. He raises Sunny with strict adherence to impeccable standards, and is bewildered when she spurns his gifts and rejects his code of values. He is tormented, moreover, by memories of a gradually revealed event in his past, when he was a paramedical officer serving in the Japanese army in Burma. Then known as Ziro Kurohata, he tries to mask his Korean origins by behaving with inculcated respect for authority. But when five young Korean women arrive to service the soldiers as “comfort girls,” his emotions betray him. He falls in love with one of them, and in a tentative attempt to behave heroically, he precipitates tragedy. Lee reveals these crucial events gradually in flashback, meanwhile also slowly completing his portrait of Hata as a decorous model citizen. After the war Hata determines never again to give way to emotion, so he loses an opportunity to enjoy love with a local widow, to give succor to another woman he admires, whose son is dying, and to establish real relationshops with others in the town of Bedley Run. Moreover, Sunny rebels against his stern standards, dropping out of high school and leaving town with a drug dealer. “You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness,” she tells him. “You burden with your generosity.” Finally, Hata is able to admit that both his exemplary behavior and his emotional reserve have been an attempt to distance himself from the dishonor of his wartime experiences. Meanwhile, he has quietly betrayed others in spite of his vow never to do so again. This ironic realization finally takes a physical toll, but opens his heart to an act of redemption. In an elegantly controlled narrative, Lee makes Hata’s tortuous dilemma agonizingly real. While the prose is measured and moves to the pace of Hata’s introspection, there is a rising tide of suspense that builds to two breathtaking climaxesAone at the army camp and the other in the present. Lee subtly contrasts the nuances of cultural conditioning in Japanese society and in Hata’s virtual reincarnation as an American citizen, all the while delivering a haunting message about the penalties one pays for such a metamorphosis. His psychologically astute depiction of Hata’s inner life is reinforced by the presence in the plot of other characters who live valiantly despite troubled lives. This is a wise, humane, fully rounded story, deeply but unsentimentally moving, and permeated with insights about the nature of human relationships. If Lee’s first novel was an impressive debut, this one marks the solid establishment of a stellar literary career. © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Gift of Christmas Present, The. Melody Carlson. 2004. 208p. Baker Publishing Group. Christine knocked on the door ready to introduce herself to her long-lost grandmother. Esther answered the knock ready to interview a housekeeper. Neither found quite what she’d expected. Christine Bradley couldn’t have been more surprised when, shortly after her mother’s death, her father revealed that Christine had been adopted at birth. As she grapples with the loss of two mothers, Christine determines to find what’s left of her biological family. As Christmas nears and Christine draws closer to the truth about her heritage, she finds an unexpected gift in the family she never knew she had.

Gilian the Dreamer: His Youth, His Love, & Adventure. Neil Munro. 1899. 353p. Dodd, Mead & Co. Set in Inverary at a time of social change—the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars—the story tells of a young boy, Gilian, who has creative gifts which in an earlier Highland society might have been nurtured to enable him to become a bard, but the old Gaelic tradition has been broken and Gilian’s gifts merely manifest themselves in excessive sensibility and self-indulgent dreaming which impede his maturity and his ability to act effectively. About the Author.

Girl, The. Catherine Cookson. 1977. 282p. William Morrow. An historical novel set in the mid-19th century. A young girl falls to a angry fate when her dying mother abandons her at her father’s home. His wife treats her cruelly, calling her The Girl. Rejected, scorned and married off to a man she does not respect, young Hannah sets out to achieve her own life. About the Author: Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock East Jarrow, part of the Tyneside, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate whom she believed to be her older sister.She began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings where she met and married a local grammer-school master. At the age of forty she began writing about the lives of the working-class people with whom she had grown up, using th place of her birth as the background to many of her novels. She died in 1998.

Girls, The. Lori Lansens. 2006. 416p. Little, Brown & Co. In Lori Lansens’ astonishing second novel, readers come to know and love two of the most remarkable characters in Canadian fiction. Rose and Ruby are twenty-nine-year-old conjoined twins. Born during a tornado to a shocked teenaged mother in the hospital at Leaford, Ontario, they are raised by the nurse who helped usher them into the world. Aunt Lovey and her husband, Uncle Stash, are middle-aged and with no children of their own. They relocate from the town to the drafty old farmhouse in the country that has been in Lovey’s family for generations. Joined to Ruby at the head, Rose’s face is pulled to one side, but she has full use of her limbs. Ruby has a beautiful face, but her body is tiny and she is unable to walk. She rests her legs on her sister’s hip, rather like a small child or a doll. In spite of their situation, the girls lead surprisingly separate lives. Rose is bookish and a baseball fan. Ruby is fond of trash TV and has a passion for local history. Rose has always wanted to be a writer, and as the novel opens, she begins to pen her autobiography. Here is how she begins: I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I’ve never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I’ve never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or solo walk. I’ve never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I’ve never done, but oh, how I’ve been loved. And, if such things were to be, I’d live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially. Ruby, with her marvellous characteristic logic,points out that Rose’s autobiography will have to be Ruby’s as well—and how can she trust Rose to represent her story accurately? Soon, Ruby decides to chime in with chapters of her own. The novel begins with Rose, but eventually moves to Ruby’s point of view and then switches back and forth. Because the girls face in slightly different directions, neither can see what the other is writing, and they don’t tell each other either. The reader is treated to sometimes overlapping stories told in two wonderfully distinct styles. Rose is given to introspection and secrecy. Ruby’s style is “tell-all”—frank and decidedly sweet. We learn of their early years as the town “freaks” and of Lovey’s and Stash’s determination to give them as normal an upbringing as possible. But when we meet them, both Lovey and Stash are dead, the girls have moved back into town, and they’ve received some ominous news. They are on the verge of becoming the oldest surviving craniopagus (joined at the head) twins in history, but the question of whether they’ll live to celebrate their thirtieth birthday is suddenly impossible to answer. In Rose and Ruby, Lori Lansens has created two precious characters, each distinct and loveable in their very different ways, and has given them a world in Leaford that rings absolutely true. The girls are unforgettable. The Girls is nothing short of a tour de force. About the Author: Lori Lansens was born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, and is now a screenwriter living in Toronto with her husband and child. Rush Home Road, her first novel, has been the subject of major international activity, and has already sold in 11 territories, including the US, the UK, France, Italy, Sweden, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Greece and Spain.

Girls in Trouble: A Novel. Caroline Leavitt. 2004. 368p. St Martin’s Press. Sara is sixteen and pregnant. Her once-devoted boyfriend seems to have disappeared, so she decides her best and only option is an open adoption with George and Eva, a couple desperate for a child. After the birth it’s clear Sara has a bond with the child that Eva can’t seem to duplicate. When it seems that Sara cannot let go, Eva and George make a drastic decision, with devastating consequences for all of them.

Glowing Heart, The. Kathleen Treves. 1992. 309p. (Large Print). Chivers North America.

God Bless John Wayne. Kinky Friedman. 1996. 256p. Bantam. His latest assignment—to track down the birth parents of his freeloader friend Ratso—proves to be no small task, but Kinky’s resentment turns to mourning when Ratso turns up dead. The trail of clues leads Kinky from downtown Manhattan to an escape on the Hudson, where a medicine chest yields the tragic truth.

God Bless the Child. Ellen Feldman. 1998. 256p. Simon & Schuster. After quitting her fast-paced job in TV news, 40ish Bailey Bender is drifting through a low-key life in the Hamptons. She works in a local bookstore, jogs on the beach, befriends a young girl struggling with the onset of adolescence, and fends off the advances of an eccentric neighbor. Still, something seems missing, and that something, Bailey comes to realize, is the child she gave up for adoption 25 years ago. Once Bailey makes up her mind to find him, she becomes unexpectedly embroiled in the lives—and deaths—of the Hamptons’ rich and famous. A 19-year-old woman dies suspiciously in a beachfront mansion, and amid sensationalistic rumors, wealthy young Charlie Prinze is arrested in what comes to be known as the Polo Murder. There are plenty of plot twists and turns in this novel’s denouement, but its real strength lies in its depth of characterization. Bailey Bender is an utterly believable character, a woman struggling to come to grips with the choices she’s made—and taking her second chances where she can find them.

Godsend, The. Bernard Taylor. 1976. 208p. Souvenir Press (UK). The author’s first novel. A couple with four children welcome a pregnant woman into their home and within hours of her mysterious visit, she has a baby girl. That night she takes off and the couple are left with the baby. They decide to adopt it and take it in for their own. But then their 7-week-old son dies struggling in his bedding. Soon more of the couple’s children start dying mysteriously.

Going Through the Motions: A Novel. Katherine Govier. 1982. 252p. McClelland & Stewart (Canada). Cornered on stage by a leering drunk Joan Sincere reacts instinctively: with one swift kick she shatters her assailant’s slack jaw. when her story makes the front page of the morning tabloid, her employer, feaing more bad publicity, fires her.

First US Edition

Goldengirl. Peter Lear. 1977. 377p. Cassell (UK). In 1977, long before he earned his Cartier Diamond Dagger award, Lovesey wrote a book about an Olympic track star and the use of growth-stimulating drugs. Given Lovesey’s current popularity, Goldengirl has just been re-released, and it’s certainly worth a read, especially for Lovesey fans. Orphan Goldine Serafin was adopted at the age of three. Her adoptive father, a brilliant physiologist who immediately saw the child’s physical potential, started her on a rigorous training course to prove his theory that humans can become “super beings”—a theory that others in his field scoff at. Serafin figures the best publicity he can get for his work is to make Goldine into a prime physical specimen who can perform the unheard-of feat of winning three gold medals at the Olympics. Enter sports promoter Jack Dryden, who senses that Goldine’s victory could spell disaster for everyone involved. An intriguing plot premise that presages some of the problems today’s Olympic athletes face, along with Lovesey’s crisp, engaging writing style and a cast of oddball characters, makes this an entertaining read.

Golden Spur, The: A Novel. Dawn Powell. 1962. 274p. Viking. If a young man finds his own father inconveniently ordinary, can he choose another? Jonathan Jaimison, the engagingly amoral hero of The Golden Spur, comes to New York from Silver City, Ohio, for exactly such a purpose. Combing through his mother’s diaries and the bars and cafes of Greenwich Village, Jonathan seeks out the writer or painter whose youthful indiscretion he believes he might have been, all the while committing numerous indiscretions of his own. By the end of the novel, Jonathan has figured out not only his paternity, but his maternity, and best of all, himself. [Pictured: at left, U.S. first edition; at right, British first edition, published by W.H. Allen, 1963; edition available to purchase: paperback reprint by Steerforth Press, 1997.]

Golden Unicorn, The. Phyllis A Whitney. 1976. 279p. Doubleday. Courney Marsh’s only clue to her past is a pendant that she has always worn, a pendant bearing a golden unicorn—long an ins ignia of the strong-willed Rhodes family, one of East Hampton’s most prominent families. She arrives at the estate in search of a truth that has eluded her a lifetime: the identity of her mother and father. From the moment of her arrival, her reception is quite different from any that a long lost daughter might expect. Courtney fights to discover her heritage, unearthing the hushed-up facts of a murder committed twenty-five years earlier. A very private scandal, the unveiling of which could not help but force the murderer’s hand again.

Gorgeous Lies. Martha McPhee. 2002. 340p. Harcourt. In a sprawling house on a hill, floating in a sea of green fields, charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying. The tribe he heads—his five children (with ex-wife Agnes: insecure Nicholas; gentle Caroline; money-hungry Sofia; barely there Timothy; and adopted Finny, son of Anton and an Italian maid); his wife’s three girls; and their uniting child, Alice—has gathered in a vigil at Chardin, the farm where they grew up and Anton played out his visions of communal living. In the 1970s they had been famous for being the new American blended family, their utopian lifestyle chronicled by film crews and reporters. But as Anton grows weaker, the hurts, allegiances, and betrayals of those years boil to the surface; and the children find themselves forced to confront the knotty intimacies of the past along with the misunderstandings of the present as they struggle to make their peace with Anton—and Anton struggles to make peace with himself.

Gower Street. Claire Rayner. 1973. 319p. Cassell (UK). Rich in historical detail, this novel is filled with a vast array of marvelously imagined characters: Abel Lackland, whose foray into bodysnatching awakens in him an intense interest in surgery; Lilith Lucas, born Lil Burnell, who will let nothing stand in the way of her rising to be queen of the English stage; Jesse Costram, rising out of the underworld stronghold of the Seven Dials to become a gentleman and foster father to Abel, and his step-daughter, Dorthea, determined that her love for the resistant Abel will prevail; Astley Cooper, daring and gifted surgeon defying the existing medical code; criminals; landed gentry; the demimonde of the theatre—all are part of the greater panorama that is Gower Street. [Pictured: US First Edition]

Grass Harp, The. Truman Capote. 1951. 182p. Random House. Set in a small Southern town in the 1930s, this classic work tells the story of three endearing misfits—an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies—who one day take up residence in a tree house. Made into a major motion picture from Fine Line Features, starring Sissy Spacek, Walter Matthau, Piper Laurie, and Nell Carter. Author also adapted novel into a two-act play (pictured at right).

Gravelight. Marion Zimmer Bradley. 1997. 352p. (Witchlight #3). St. Martin’s Press, Inc. Wycherly Musgrave doesn’t have good luck with cars and alcohol. Trying to outrun the memory of a young woman he may have killed in a drunk-driving accident, Wych sends his expensive sports car sailing off the road...and, with his usual impossible luck, survives the crash with no more than a few bumps and bruises. the car is totaled, stranding Wycherly in the tiny mountain town of Morton’s Fork. Making the best of a bad situation, Wych decides to try to dry out. Wycherly isn’t Morton’s Fork’s only unusual guest this summer: A movie star has taken up residence in a converted schoolhouse. Sinah Dellon left Morton’s Fork as an infant foundling. Now she’s come home to learn who her people were—and why she has the ability to read minds. But Sinah’s psychic powers do not help her with the townsfolk, who turn from her in fear and hatred. Equally untrustworthy, according to the residents of Morton’s Fork, are the RV-load of researchers from the Bidney Institute, come to investigate centuries of reported hauntings, vanishings, poltergeists, and other phenomena. They too are poking around in things better left unexplored. Before long, Truth Blackburn, heroine of Bradley’s novel Ghostlight, discovers that the source of the psychic storm is a renegade Gate—and one with a connection to Truth’s own tangled past. But she cannot close the Gate alone, and the true Keeper is nowhere to be found. In despair, Wycherly Musgrave has made a pact with evil. In fear, Sinah Dellon feels her soul slipping away under attack from a vengeful spirit. In dread, Truth Blackburn must make a great sacrifice to save all the people of Morton’s Fork, and the man she loves, from the power of the Gate.

Green. Frances Sherwood. 1995. 419p. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Green is a novel about innocence lost: about the painful and often hilarious passage from youth to adulthood that we all must traverse. It is the story of Zoe McLaren, a Mormon girl of pioneer stock growing up in Monterey, California, during the 1950’s. At odds with her prejudicial, convention-bound society, Zoe fancies herself a beatnik, a rebel with a cause—freedom—and wishes above all to merge with something worthwhile. Yet she is a product of her times, a naive adventurer easily drawn down a precarious path. Zoe has a love affair with the father of her best friend, Margo, a brilliant African American girl adopted by a leftist Jewish couple, and marries a man of Native american descent who drags her off to Big Sur to “get back to the land.” But the deep woods are not Walden, nor is her husband Thoreau. After great personal loss, Zoe learns that the answers she seeks are rooted neither in the untamed natural world nor in bookish idealism. They are, rather, a combination of voices, a reflection of the diversity of our culture. In the end, Zoe realizes she must shed her green skin and learn to live for herself.

Green Tree in Gedde, A. Alan Sharp. 1965. 380p. Michael Joseph (UK). This novel is a massive indictment of provincial life and a plea for roots, written by an author himself adopted at an early age. Bitter, funny and beautiful. The first volme of a planned of a trilogy, of which only the second installment saw print: The Wind Shifts (1967). About the Author: Sharp was born in Alyth, Scotland, and raised in the tough Scottish port town of Greenock. He was illegitimate and was adopted by a Greenock shipyard worker and his wife when just a few weeks old. At the age of 14, he followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a shipyard worker. Four years later, he enlisted in the army. After his discharge, he began his writing career as a novelist, although his first book was five years in the making. The time turned out to be well spent, as it resulted in the award-winning A Green Tree in Gedde, which established Sharp as a major literary newcomer. He confirmed the promise of that first book with his second tome, The Wind Shifts, before turning his attention to writing screenplays.

Guarded. Kirsten Lasinski. 2005. 240p. Moody Publishers. Forty-one year-old Emily Blyton should be content; she has a job she loves, a beautiful home, and countless friends in the quaint mountain community of Murray, Colorado. On the other hand, she also has an estranged daughter who lives in New York, an ex-husband she hasn’t spoken to in years, and a past full of painful memories she can’t erase. When Emily discovers that she was adopted, her carefully arranged world comes apart. By the Same Author: The Fall (2003).

Guardian of the Dawn. Richard Zimler. 2005. 404p. Dell Publishing. From Kirkus Reviews: The Inquisition visits on Portuguese Goa a great terror worthy of Josef Stalin, testing a fragile family to the limit. Tiago Zarco, Zimler’s half-Jewish, half-Indian narrator, opens this rich, fast-moving story recalling the events that landed him in a prison dedicated to those the Inquisition has set aside for its special attention. Zarco, whose mother died shortly after the birth of his only sibling, Sofia, was fondly raised by his Portuguese-born Jewish father, an illustrator for a nearby Mogul price, and by Nupi, the Indian cook his mother salvaged from life as a beggar. As descendants of artist Berekiah Zarco, protagonist of Zimler’s 1998 The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Sofia and Tiago exhibit considerable graphic skills that their father has honed. But those refined talents are of no use at all when the family is caught in the virtuously sadistic grip of the Dominicans, betrayed by someone close to them. The most likely suspects are the awful Portuguese aunt Maria, wife of Tiago’s merchant uncle Isaac, a Christian convert; and Wadi, the Arab orphan adopted by Maria and Isaac. Maria detests her husband’s Jewish background and family, and handsome arrogant Wadi bears a long-held grudge against Tiago, possibly for spurning his adolescent love. Tiago’s father is the first victim of the holy terror, a prison suicide whose death was facilitated by his grieving son, the next to be imprisoned. Tiago, whose fiancee is pregnant, saves himself by professing Christianity, but his sentence to prison in Lisbon, rather than leading to the repentance desired by the Catholics, gives him time to construct a complex revenge against both his betrayer and the priest who sentenced him and his father. Whenhe at last returns to Goa, he believes he knows whom he must punish, but he is compelled to have absolute proof. The weird contrast of Christianity at its most murderous and India at its most sumptuous jars the senses as crime and punishment work their usual spell in this deeply absorbing work.