From the Publisher: Endorsed by the National Association of Mothers’ Centers and a gold award winner in the category of Inspirational/Motivational from the Mom Choice Awards®, this book is about the power of unconditional love, women empowerment, and potent leadership. Through nurturing motherly love, moms have the ability to make a positive difference in the lives of their loved ones in the roles of teacher, coach, and counselor. The book offers a wealth of wisdom for good parenting skills and communicating more effectively. Adopted at birth in Malaysia, Johnny Tan later arrived in the United States at 18 to attend college. His life’s journey led him to cross paths with several women whom he affectionately refers to as moms. His 9 moms’ insightful parenting skills and motivational words of wisdom helped him overcome the challenges of everyday living.

The book pays tribute to moms all over the world in an entertaining, inspiring, and educational way. The kitchen is used as a wonderful backdrop because it is the heart of every home, and where Johnny and his moms enjoyed their many conversations. This book is designed as a keepsake for all occasions, meant to last and inspire forever. It includes a blank dedication page for readers to inscribe their own loved one’s name, and a space where readers can record their recipes for living. At the very end of the book, Johnny incorporates nine of his favorite food recipes.

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About the Author: Johnny Tan is a Social Entrepreneur, Founder & CEO of From My Mama’s Kitchen®, an educational platform advocating “Personal Success Begins at Home, The Power of Unconditional Love, and Living and Performing in Our Genius Zone” to build a better world. He is also the Publisher of Inspirations for Better Living, a digital magazine designed to help Moms build a better future for themselves, their families, and their loved ones, and owner of the WordsHavePower.store.

Johnny is also an experiential keynote speaker, executive career & life coach, mentor, talk show host, and multi-award-winning and bestselling author. His proprietary keynotes and workshops help people discover their best and highest selves by utilizing the Six Cornerstones of Self-Mastery, where they experience the Synergy of Success, Harmony, and Joy in everything they do!

He was awarded the prestigious 2020-2021 Top 100 Visionaries in Education by the Global Forum for Education and Learning (GFEL) and is an Executive Contributor to Global BRAINZ Magazine. Johnny’s life journey has prepared him to be a compelling new voice on Conscious Living and Working in today’s New Normal.

Johnny experienced a Spiritual Awakening while writing his first book, From My Mama’s Kitchen: Food for the Soul, Recipes for Living, honoring his nine moms. The book is about the power of unconditional motherly love, practical, and timeless principles he learned from his nine moms, who were his teachers, coaches, and counselors.

From the Publisher: Frank Howard’s mother was a prostitute; his father, purportedly her pimp. When he was six months old they placed him in the care of foster parents who never let him forget that he was the child of those “no-good sons of bitches” At twelve he was committed by a judge to the care of the Children’s Aid Society and taken to an orphanage in Vancouver. En route he was sexually molested by the policeman accompanying him. Dumped into the foster care circuit, he twice attempted suicide. He never finished grade ten. At eighteen he was sentenced to two years in the B.C. Penitentiary for armed robbery.

In From Prison to Parliament, Howard describes those early years, his life in prison, and how, on finishing his sentence, he vowed never to return to crime. He never did. He became a logger, then President of the Loggers’ Local of the I.W.A. At twenty-eight he entered politics as a C.C.F. M.L.A. and went on to become the M.P. for the Northern B.C. riding of Skeena. He held that seat for seventeen years, longer than anyone else since its formation in 1914.

During his twenty-seven years as a politician, he won ten elections. Frank Howard was decidedly instrumental in getting Aboriginal people who lived on reserves the right to vote in federal elections. His three-year filibuster in the House of Commons produced reforms to Canada’s divorce laws. His passion for prison reform led to the closure of Canada’s barbaric Saint Vincent de Paul Penitentiary.

Blunt, tough, Frank Howard pulls no punches in describing some of his C.C.F./N.D.P. fellow politicians. Reading From Prison to Parliament, it’s easy to understand how his street smarts served his constituents, while at the same time infuriating other politicians.

The story you are about to read is incredible but true. It’s the story of a walk through hell. A story of extremes—from the depths of addiction, suicide, and crime, to a life that could never be imagined. Experience the delivering power of the Holy Spirit. This is the journey of Samuel Douglas Caywood, a.k.a. Stephen Kelly Downing, and but for a twist of fate, the story could be yours.

How does a biracial child of the ’50s cope in the hostile black community in which she lives and the unaccepting white world she can’t avoid? How does she survive the problematic adoption by a biracial, middle-aged couple whose marriage is crumbling? Integrated couples were not allowed to adopt in the 1950s and the unusual means by which this child was acquired will be sure to arrest your complete attention! Before the Civil Rights Era, the angst between the races was a solidly entrenched social evil much more volatile than this present day and the only thing that either race hated more than each other was the product of the occasional racial treason; a mixed child. When you are relegated to the outskirts of society and lack meaningful connections of family, friends, or community, how do you abolish bitterness and expand your solitude into dimensions of peace, beauty, and productivity? At age sixteen a marriage enforced by parents would involve a move to a strange, new city where frequent mental and physical violence would become daily realities at the hands of a deeply troubled man engulfed in the world of drugs. Widowed by tragedy at age twenty-one, the depths of solitude had been plumbed. How do you maintain warm, human hope in a cold world? Solitude ... the inward frontier. Welcome to my world!

From the Back Cover: Whenever she speaks to a stranger in her native Korea, Jane Jeong Trenka is forced to explain what she is. Japanese? Chinese? The answer—that she was adopted from Korea as a baby and grew up in the United States—is a source of grief, pride, and confusion. In this searching and provocative follow-up to The Language of Blood, Trenka explores the possibility of making a new, adult life in Korea.

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About the Author: Jane Jeong Trenka has won numerous awards and fellowships for her writing. She is the author of The Language of Blood, called “original and beautifully written” by Publishers Weekly. She now lives in Korea.

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By the Same Author: The Language of Blood: A Memoir (2003, Borealis Books) and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (Ed., with Julia Chinyere Oparah & Sun Yung Shin; 2006, South End Press).

At thirty-three, Craig, a black writer and artist, heeds the signs of his life and journeys into uncharted waters. After six years of searching, he shows up unannounced on his birth mother’s doorstep. Craig’s parents and sister are supportive of his search, as is Job, the Dutchman with whom Craig has shared the last four years of his life. Jennifer, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, happy that her son has found her, attempts to allay her guilt and shame for giving him up and tries to make up for lost time. After all, she believes her son loves men because she abandoned him at birth. In an opportunistic turn of events, Craig plans a big family feast down in Georgia where England, the matriarch who forced her daughter to give him up at birth, lives in the apartment at the back of her son Joshua’s twenty-two room “castle in the sky.” Craig’s adoptive family meets Jennifer’s entire family and all sorts of sparks fly in the castle on Ella Lane. Craig struggles with whether or not he wants Jennifer to remain a part of his life and what kind of relationship, if any, he can have with his three biological sisters, all of whom growing up desperately wanted a brother. Part mystery, part history, part family saga, part divination—all of it true—Fumbling Toward Divinity bears witness to the transcendent power of spirit and love in an age of terror and madness. Borrowing from ancient oral traditions, the story is told in the third person, whereby the telling of the story becomes part of the story itself. From the opening pages to the poignant conclusion, Craig Hickman re-invents the memoir and proves himself a master storyteller. About the Author: Craig Hickman is a poet, performance artist, cultural activist and author of The Language of Mirrors and the bestseller Rituals: Poetry and Prose. He is the biological great grandson of Madree Penn White, co-founder of the Delta Theta Sigma sorority. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. He is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant, a Gertrude Williams Johnson Literary Award from Ebony, and the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement from the Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance. He lives in Maine.

Garden hopping was when you leapt through a line of people’s gardens in the dead of night. Only a few boys did it. The air rushed through you. You were like a phantom. You could have been anyone. It is an apt metaphor for the adoption business. Jonathan Rendall was adopted in the 1960s when it was easy. People could just pick out the children they wanted, right down to the colour of their hair. But what of the children themselves? And what happens when years later they trace their real parents? Garden Hopping is a harrowing, and often shocking, journey into the dark night of identity.

From the Back Cover: What do you say to a mother you’ve never seen?

True stories of trial and triumph in the search for birth families by adoptees. Written by an an adopted Pulitzer Prize nominee.

“Only a few days before I boarded the plane, I for the first time in my life had looked at the face of an adult whom I physically resembled. When photos of my birth mother arrived in the mail, they were greeted by shrieks of joy and wonder by my husband and young son, who peered at the face that stared at him from the photograph and mused, ‘So that’s where I get my big brown eyes.’”

Even surrounded by the love and security of the only family she had ever known, Kay Moore wondered constantly about her unknown past. Would her birth mother ever be willing to meet her? Would her adoptive parents think she was ungrateful for needing so desperately to know? How would changing attitudes and new laws affect her search?

That search led Kay to other adoptees, adoptive parents and birth families, and she discovered that her feelings were the shared legacy of people everywhere who want the whole truth about who they are. Their stories, told here, yield a wealth of inspiration and practical direction which Kay presents with a sensitivity possible only from one who has “been through it” herself. She knows what questions you’ll need to answer for a successful search and includes a listing of resources you can use along the way. You’ll see just how to pull together the missing pieces in your own past and fully discover your God-given heritage.

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About the Author: Kay Moore is a writer and conference speaker on the subject of adoption, and design editor of LIFE Support Group materials. Previously, she was a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, where her story about the search for her own birth family was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also been a newspaper city editor and a staff writer for UPI.

Imagine being born into the most abject poverty. You live almost like a feral child: unattended, unloved, dirty, abused, and tied to a crib by your unwed mother. And then you become a commodity, when your mother sells you to a prominent businessman and his wife for a thousand dollars. This was how life began for author Patsy Dolson. In her memoir, Dolson tells her story of poverty, physical and emotional abuse, and unspoken secrets. As her adopted mother began to abuse her, Dolson grew up without hope that she would be rescued. She dreamed that marriage and a career as a nurse would bring her the happiness and security she sought. When she became a mother, a transformational process began to create a better life for her children. And yet she was still filled with grief and despair. The pain of her memories began to threaten her marriage, her relationship with her children, and her career. But a strong divine presence within her during her season of discovery delivered Dolson from the bondage begun in childhood. She opened the door to all that she had buried over the years. She went forward, facing her past and her pain. With the help of her church, family, counselors, and intense personal motivation, she confronted a mountain of unwanted baggage looming over her life and started the process of healing. The Lord restored, healed, and brought wholeness into her life, taking her brokenness and formed a new and miraculous work within her. This is her story.

From the Back Cover: Ghost of Sangju takes readers through Soojung Jo’s childhood in Kentucky filled with joy, family, friendship—and the loneliness of being marked as an outsider even in her own home. Alternating between humor and heartbreak, she offers a glimpse into a life foreign to most: that of a West Point cadet and her return to South Korea, the country that had once sent her away. Soojung vividly paints a portrait of marriage, parenthood (as both a biological and adoptive mother) and the tumultuous emotions of reuniting, rediscovering, and reestablishing lost familial bonds. Ghost of Sangju is a story of one woman’s journey to merge her two selves, and the universal search for self-discovery, identity, and reconciliation.

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About the Author: Soojung Jo lives and writes in Southern California with her husband and four children. Ghost of Sangju is her debut work.

From the Back Cover: Born in Austria at the height of World War II, Ingeborg Day grew up knowing little about the early years of her life. When she came to America in 1957, she heard for the first time of Hitler, Nazis, and the Holocaust—topics that were forbidden in her own house. After Day’s father joined the Austrian army as part of the military band, he became an early member of the Nazi Party and was automatically incorporated into the SS after the Anschluss in 1938. But after the fall of the Third Reich, he refused to speak of his past.

Moving back and forth in time, from 1980s New York to World War I Austria under Kaiser Franz Josef, Day’s memoir illuminates her country’s painful history as well as her own memories of the war, the Russian and English occupations, and the strangely silent 1950s.

Ghost Waltz, Day’s astonishing and beautiful memoir, tells of her efforts to understand the legacy of her Austrian past—one of haunting history mixed with ordinary family loyalty and affection.

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About the Author: Ingeborg Day published Ghost Waltz in 1980, two years after she published Nine and a Half Weeks under the pseudonym Elizabeth McNeill. She was an editor at Ms. magazine when both books were published. She died in 2011 at the age of seventy.

In this book, Dr. Grace LaJoy shares her life story of being deserted by her mother, living in foster care, and ending up in a gifted and talented class while still in foster care. She recalls her life story before, during and after foster care. Her turbulent life experiences reveal how she became strong and began to encourage, inspire and empower others through her gift of writing. Finally, she offers words of inspiration, encouragement, and empowerment to both children and parents. Children learn that they can succeed and impact the lives of others even in the face of adversity. Parents learn specific steps to help children recognize and utilize their gift(s).

From the Back Cover: Girl ’44 is the story of an innocent child’s survival in a harsh world. Until the age of seven, Nan Shirley Ann Miller lived, unknowingly, behind a shattered mirror of bad luck: abandonment by her birth parents, life in an orphanage and numerous foster care facilities until she was finally adopted into a high society family.

Known as “Girl ’44” by the Cuyahoga County Department of Human Services in Ohio, Nan Shirley Ann Miller reunited with her birth family after a miraculous chain of events—fifty-five years after being adopted. This helped her to answer many questions about herself, including the discovery of her Cherokee ancestry.

In the space of three whirlwind months, Nan’s older sister Betsy—“Girl ’43”—re-entered her life, and revealed many of her recollections of their tragic early childhood, including the details of Nan’s hidden away memories of physical abuse.

Although handed a difficult start in life, today Nan successfully enjoys her multiple roles as wife, mother, grandmother, sister, educator, artist, clown, and writer.

From the Back Cover: At the vulnerable age of 12, Lara McDonnell was picked out by a gang of men who befriended her, showered her with attention and gained her trust. Impressionable, she was easily manipulated and groomed by the gang, who deliberately kept her compliant with drink and drugs. It wasn’t long before she was being trafficked around the country and her life spiraled out of control.

Deeply disturbed and terrified of what the gang would do to her if she tried to escape their evil clutches, it would take over five years for Lara to find the strength to fight back.

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About the Author: This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. The names of people, places, dates, sequences or the details of any events may have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

Following Lara’s horrifying ordeal, she found the strength to become a key witness in the trial of Britain’s most evil sex ring and has since rebuilt her life with her son and adoptive mother.

Whisked away at age 10 from a tiny Greek village and stranded with a family of strangers in the U.S., a San Clemente author hopes her book will help others. From the beginning, Joanna Giangardella’s childhood was tumultuous. Born in an impoverished village at the end of Greece’s civil war, she lost her father at age five and then got shipped to an abusive home in Los Angeles as part of an alleged black-market adoption scheme. Giangardella, 63, of San Clemente, made a good life for herself, however. She beat cancer and got a degree in art at the Laguna College of Art and Design. Now she’s written a book about her experiences, specifically her adoption and the quest to find her birth family.

From the Back Cover: CHOSEN AND SPECIAL

Those are the words Margot Starbuck used to describe herself as a child adopted into a loving family. But the word she really believed about herself was rejected. First by her birth parents. Then by her adoptive father—when he moved away and divorced her adoptive mother. Then by her new stepfather. Then by her birth father a second time, when she tried to invite him into her life.

Most of all, Margot felt rejected by God the Father, who she also suspected could not be trusted.

With a good dose of humor and a willingness not to take herself too seriously, Margot Starbuck offers us an exuberant, frank and, at times, poignant romp as she searches for the Father who will not fail. You are invited to come along.

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About the Author: Margot Starbuck is a popular speaker at conferences and retreats and on college campuses. She has written for a variety of publications such as Pray, MI and Neue. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

She was found abandoned in the lavatory of a cafeteria in Bogota, Colombia. The police who picked her up named her Maria Consuelo. From a stack of would-be parents, Colombia’s welfare agency chose Valerie Kreutzer’s application, and the toddler quickly bonded with her new mom in Washington, D.C. At school Maria struggled with severe learning disabilities despite a superior I.Q., but also blossomed into an award-winning young artist. Her impulsive behavior led to fits and false starts during adolescence, until she found happiness at 21 with David and his extended family. Their love and lives ended in the curve of a rural road in Florida. A Girl Named Maria chronicles an adopted daughter’s struggle with identity and her yearning for a birth family that may have included a twin brother. Maria’s legacy lives on in this poignant personal story of one mother’s unconditional love for her adopted daughter. About the Author: For 23 years, Valerie S. Kreutzer worked as broadcaster, writer, and editor for Voice of America and the U.S. Information Agency in Washington, D.C. Previously, she was an editor with Houghton Mifflin Co. As a freelancer, she has published essays, travel and opinion pieces in journals and newspapers including The Washington Post.

Girl of the Danube demonstrates the resilience and triumph of the human spirit. It is the true story of an orphan growing up during the turbulent 1940s and 1950s in Budapest, Hungary. She bore witness to the Nazi and Communist eras, her own life filled with twists and turns. A new family gave her hope, but outside was a world of deception, hardship, and tragedy.

From the Dust Jacket: In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the several decades before Roe v. Wade. This is the true story of “sex and the single girl” in the post-World War II years—a story not of carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that had punishing long-term effects on millions of American women who were told they had no choice but to give up their children.

Ann Fessler brings the women’s voices as well as the spirit of those times to life brilliantly, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, she traveled the country interviewing more than one hundred women willing to speak out about their experiences. The stories she uncovered are often shocking in their revelation of the degree of pressure brought to bear on these women, the lack of compassion and guidance shown them, and the failure to appreciate the lifelong consequences of coercing a woman to surrender her child.

As a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted; abortion was still illegal in most states, and was prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, the postwar economic boom brought millions of families into the middle class, along with intense social pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. While young men who engaged in sex often saw their reputations enhanced, single women who became pregnant were shunned by family and friends, evicted from school, and sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, often treated with cold contempt by doctors and nurses. They were told that surrendering their children was by far the best solution, and that doing so would allow them to simply move on and forget. But they never did forget.

The vast majority of women Fessler interviewed were given no option but to surrender, and every single one of them has been haunted by the loss of her child for the rest of her life. Many of these women have never discussed their experience with anyone, ever—not their mothers, sisters, friends, or even their spouses—due to shame and guilt. As Ann Fessler writes, “What impressed me so powerfully was the commonalities in the women’s experiences. How the surrender was not only a deeply personal experience that affected the life of each woman but also a profound collective experience.”

At a time when the future of the Roe decision and women’s reproductive rights as well as the opening of adoption records are subjects of heated national debate, The Girls Who Went Away is a searing and vital revelation of a much-too-long-hidden social history.

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About the Author: Ann Fessler began interviewing women who surrendered children for adoption for an audio and video installation project, out of which this book has grown. She is a professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design and a specialist in installation art. She was awarded a prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship for 2003—2004 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, where she conducted extensive research for this book. She is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the LEF Foundation; the Rhode Island Foundation; the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities; and Art Matters, NY. An adoptee herself, she begins and ends the book with the story of her own successful quest to find her mother.

From the Back Cover: In 1932, Elisabeth Congdon, an unmarried heiress to a mining fortune, adopts a three-month-old baby girl. The child, Marjorie, grows up in the Glensheen Mansion in Duluth, Minnesota, given everything she could possibly need, or want.

Forty-five years later, Elisabeth, who is beloved throughout the community, is found smothered in her bed. Her night nurse has been bludgeoned to death with a candlestick. Evidence pints to Elisabeth’s son-in-law, Roger Caldwell and her adopted daughter Marjorie. This is the inside story of Marjorie Caldwell and the stream of mysterious arsons and murders that have followed in her wake.

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About the Author: Sharon Darby Hendry divides her time between the Twin Cities and northern Wisconsin. Her first manuscript, An Element of Truth, a true story about a woman con artist, was translated into a made-for-TV movie, starred Donna Mills, and aired don CBS. Hendry and her husband live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They have two grown daughters.

From the Publisher: Every individual has a story—painful or happy—and the story will only be complete and meaningful when shared with others willing to listen to it. These are the stories of several people who embarked on a journey toward healing from abortion, adoption, abuse (sexual and spousal), anger, bullying, cutting, infertility, divorce, grief, people pleasing, and fear, as well as people struggling to break the chains of psychological colonialism/neocolonialism and to survive as orphans. This book contains a wealth of knowledge on how transformation of life can take place using Narrative Counseling. Most of the stories shared in this book are personal to many of the authors. Some share their journey of struggling with hopeless situations to where they regained hope through counseling using the Narrative approach. Others, such as the orphaned children, found relief in just having someone sit with them to listen to their daily struggles of living an orphaned life. In this book you will find a place where these stories will somehow intersect with your own story. Take a chance, read, and you will find a glimmer of hope in these stories.

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About the Author: Tapiwa N. Mucherera is Professor of Pastoral Counseling at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is author of Meet Me at the Palaver and Glimmers of Hope. He is editor of Pastoral Care, Health, Healing, and Wholeness in African Contexts: Methodology, Context, and Issues, and has also contributed chapters to several academic books. An ordained United Methodist Church (UMC) pastor, he has served several churches in Zimbabwe, Iowa, Denver, and Kentucky. Mucherera is serving on the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Florida UMC Annual Conference, and serves on the ACPE National Board.

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Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, Chapter 1:“Identity is in One’s Story: Healing Identity Wounds of Adoption through Narrative Therapy” by Trisha L. Kraal, and Chapter 14: “Just One to Hold: A Narrative Counseling Approach to Living with Infertility” by Marci Bourland.

From the Publisher: Every family has a secret. But what if that secret makes you question your own place in the family? Mixing equal parts memoir, detective story, and popular-science narrative, this is the emotionally charged account of one man’s quest to find out the truth about his genetic heritage—and confront the agonizing possibility of having to redefine the first fifty years of his life.

Shortly before his father’s death, Lennard Davis received a cryptic call from his uncle Abie, who said he had a secret he wanted to tell him one day. When finally revealed, the secret—that Abie himself was Davis’s father, via donor insemination—seemed too preposterous to be true. Born in 1949, Davis wasn’t even sure that artificial insemination had existed at that time. Moreover, his uncle was mentally unstable, an unreliable witness to the past. Davis tried to erase the whole episode from his mind.

Yet it wouldn’t disappear. As a child, Davis had always felt oddly out of place in his family. Could Abie’s story explain why? Over time Davis’s doubts grew into an obsession, until finally, some twenty years after Abie’s phone call, he launched an investigation—one that took him to DNA labs and online genealogical research sites, and into intense conversations with family members whose connection to him he had begun to doubt.

At once an absorbing personal journey and a fascinating intellectual foray into the little-known history of artificial insemination and our millennia-long attempt to understand the mysteries of sexual reproduction, Davis’s quest challenges us to ask who we are beyond a mere collection of genes. And as the possibility of finding the truth comes tantalizingly within reach, with Davis facing the agonizing possibility of having to re-envision his early years and his relationships with those closest to him, his search turns into a moving meditation on the nature of family bonds, as well as a new understanding of the significance of the swarms of chemicals that are the blueprints for our very human selves.

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About the Author: Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English, Disability Studies, and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He divides his time between Chicago and New York.

Accompany Bobbie as she traces back the path of her life; from her Ojibwa roots to her rejection of her culture following the horrific abuse she endured during her childhood. She reflects on her life with sadness and humor recalling her tumultuous marriage and divorce, her life as a single parent, her battle with drugs and alcohol and the long road back to her traditions that took decades. God don’t Make No Junk will stay in the readers mind long after they finish reading it.

From the Dust Jacket: Paddy Doyle’s mother died from cancer in 1955. His father committed suicide shortly afterwards. Paddy was sentenced in an Irish district court to be detained in an industrial school for eleven years. He was four years old.

This award-winning bestseller is a moving and terrifying testament of the institutionalised Ireland of only thirty-five years ago, seen through the bewildered eyes of a child. During his detention, Paddy was viciously assaulted and sexually abused by the nuns charged to care for him, and within three years his experiences began to result in physical manifestations of trauma. He was taken one night to hospital and left there, never to see his custodians again. This period of his life, during which he was a constant witness to death, culminated in brain surgery at the age of ten—by which time he had become permanently disabled.

This is the remarkable true story of a survivor, told with an extraordinary lack of bitterness. In Paddy Doyle’s own words: “It is about society’s abdication of responsibility to a child. The fact that I was that child, and that the book is about my life, is largely irrelevant. The probability is that there were, and still are, thousands of ‘me’s.”

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About the Author: Paddy Doyle was born in Wexford in 1951 and now lives in Dublin. He is married with three grown up sons. He is recognized as a leading disability activist in Ireland and has been a member of the government-appointed Commission of the Status of People with Disabilities.

A frequent contributor to television, radio and the print media on matters as diverse as the role of the church in caring for children to the legalization of marijuana for medical use, he is currently Chief Executive of the National Representative Council—a body established to ensure that the rights of people with disabilities are upheld. He has also travelled extensively throughout Europe and the United States, speaking at conferences about disability and child sexual abuse.

Paddy Doyle was the first recipient of the Christy Brown Award for Literature, in 1984, for a television play entitled Why do I Bother. Shortly after it was first published, The God Squad became a bestselling book in both Ireland and the United Kingdom. It also won the Sunday Tribune Arts Award for Literature. In 1993 Paddy Doyle was awarded a Person of the Year Award for An Outstanding Contribution to Irish Society by the Rehab Group.

From the Dust Jacket: “On Guy Fawkes’s Day 1937, eight days after I was born, my mother Truda published an advertisement in the Personal Column of the London Daily Express offering me, in effect, to the highest bidder...” So begins on of the most talked-about books of the last decade, the sensational autobiographical bestseller God Stand Up For Bastards, first published in 1973. The result of a lifelong obsession, the book was journalist and author David Leitch’s attempt to find the mother who had given him away to strangers in a hotel bedroom thirty-seven years before.

The book was a remarkable success. Not only was it one of the year’s top-selling titles, it also succeeded in putting David Leitch in touch at last with his natural mother, Truda. After some months cautious correspondence, they were reunited in Liverpool and enjoyed an elusive, distantly loving relationship for seven years until Truda’s death in 1981. Among the family secrets Leitch uncovered during those years was the existence of a younger sister, Margaret, but it was not until their mother’s funeral that they finally met. In the enthralling sequel to this book, Family Secrets, published in 1984, David Leitch movingly chronicles the discovery of his lost family, and appeals for a second sister, Linda, to make herself known.

Read in light of these events, twelves years on, God Stand Up For Bastards is an even more fascinating book than before, not merely the richly entertaining account of a distinguished life but one of the strangest and most moving personal histories of our time.

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By the Same Author: Family Secrets: A Writer’s Search for His Parents and His Past (1984).

The God that Prevailed traces the journey of an adopted Catholic of the baby boom generation who joins a religious cult and his incredible thirty-year spiritual odyssey back to Catholicism. Dennis Gerard Embo, eldest of six adopted children, dreamed of serving as a Catholic missionary priest in central Africa. Not long after entering the seminary in 1970, Embo abandoned Catholicism and became an ardent disciple of an eccentric, West Coast advertising-genius-turned-televangelist by the name of Herbert W. Armstrong. The eventful journey includes Embo’s sometimes-bizarre experiences after pledging unquestioning allegiance to Armstrong’s secretive, heretical sect-the Worldwide Church of God. Only years after the death of Herbert Armstrong did Embo and tens of thousands of other sect members awaken, as if out of a spiritual stupor, to acknowledge the extent of their departure from the historic Christian faith. Thus begins Embo’s pilgrimage with his wife back to the Catholic faith. Embo’s poignant reunion with his birth mother in 1977 is a critical part of his story. His experiences as an adoptee later brought him to a profound appreciation of Catholicism’s 2,000-year-old proclamation of the Gospel of Life. The God that Prevailed is a thrilling and inspiring spiritual journey.

Sarah Valentine’s search for her biological family. God shared his laughter with Sarah, leading her on a incredible journey that resulted in her finding her family.

God’s Story tells the true story of someone who grew up as a foster child but through all of life’s challenges he learns that God had a purpose for him all along. Written to help foster parents to understand the challenges involved. This book will also help anyone who has had tragedies and wants to learn that God has an ultimate personal plan for them.

Maria Kelmis was adopted from Greece at the age of fifteen months. She always knew she was adopted and considers it one of the best things that happened in her life. Golden Strangers is a story about a journey to find her biological mother specifically to thank her and tell her that she had a wonderful life. You will experience the great moments in Maria’s life that may not have happened if she was not adopted from Greece. Journey with Maria to San Diego, California, as a young lady out on her own for the first time, share her multiple visits to Greece including the months she spent on the island of Santorini painting, travel with her to Uganda, Africa, as she embarks on the experience of a lifetime, and share the excitement of participating in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. All these events combined with her biological mother’s sacrifice have made Maria thankful for all of the blessings in her life and have given her the desire to give back in so many ways; from working and volunteering with the Greek Orthodox Church, to helping the homeless, volunteering with autistic children, and becoming a certified life coach, thereby helping people with their life goals. This book is not only for people who share her story of adoption, it is for anyone who loves to hear a great story and believes in a power greater than all of us that makes things happen in our lives. If you have adopted a child or know of someone who has, you are encouraged to buy her children’s book, Rainbow Bridge (2010), which is a book for parents to read to their children of any age to let them know that they were adopted and that they are special and loved, also published by AuthorHouse.

From the Dust Jacket: Paul Arnott has two first memories. One is as a two-year-old having a bath in a hotel sink in Tenby; the other, a Bromley afternoon, when Mr. and Mrs. Arnott told Paul that “his real Mummy and Daddy couldn’t keep him” and that they had adopted him. Then, for thirty years, he barely gave his adoption a moment’s thought—until the observation of the likeness between himself and his newborn son prompted a quest to find his own biological parents ...

To his astonishment and delight, what he discovered was a near-complete family in Ireland—his parents had later married and had four other children—who had been lighting a candle in his name every day for thirty-three years. A Good Likeness weaves historical, political, religious and psychological thought into an intimate narrative of the hopes, “what-ifs,” and discoveries of the author’s quest. He talks to those of his parent’s generation who did not yield to the pressure to abandon the illegitimate, and to the children with very different stories to tell, as well as priests and politicians, newfound families and the supportive or unreconciled adoptive relatives.

Touching on the wider social issues of the adoptive process, Paul Arnott’s journey in search of his roots is also an intensely personal, highly charged exploration of childhood, and a moving and candid memoir.

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About the Author: Paul Arnott was born in 1961. He has contributed to publications such as the Independent and Time Out, before becoming Series Editor of the Channel 4 daily arts programme. He has since evolved into a television producer and director, filming at Cannes, across India and Johannesburg and with the RSC.

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By the Same Author: Let Me Eat Cake: A Life Lived Sweetly (2000, Sceptre).