This book brings to light the lives of 1.5 million single American women in the years following World War II who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced to give up their newborn children. It tells not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up. Single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted...

An acclaimed novelist's memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family. Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a 22-year-old single woman having an affair with a much older married man. Thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her. Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and intensity of her storytelling, tells how they made contact with...

Nina Popkin goes searching for her birth mother and in the process turns some lives upside down, but also learns that family has nothing to do with DNA.

"As their senior year approaches, four diverse friends joined by their weekly Dungeons & Dragons game struggle to figure out real life. Archie's trying to cope with the lingering effects of his parents' divorce, Mari's considering an opportunity to contact her biological mother, Dante's working up the courage to come out to his friends, and Sam's clinging to a failing relationship. The four eventually embark on a cross-country road trip in an attempt...

After meeting at a psychiatric hospital, damaged souls Jane and Joey change their lives with a road trip after receiving a letter from the son she gave up for adoption years ago. Along the way they encounter colorful people and magical revelations that will changes their lives.

"Sixteen-year-old Nora Wakelin has always felt like an outsider in her own family. Her parents and older sister love her, but they don't understand anything about her: not her passion for music, not her all-encompassing crush on her bandmate Daniel (who is very much unavailable), not her recklessness and impulsiveness. Nora has always imagined that her biological mother might somehow provide the answer as to why she feels like such an outsider. ...

"The sun beamed down on Melissa Henderson's shining dark hair, pinned up on her head in a loose knot, as sweat ran down her face, and the muscles in her long, lithe arms were taut with effort as she worked. She was lost in concentration, sanding a door of the house in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts that had been her salvation. She had bought it four years before. It had been weather-beaten, shabby and in serious need of repair when she found...

Raised by loving adoptive parents, San Francisco private investigator Wyatt Hunt never had an interest in finding his birth family--until he gets a chilling text message from an unknown number: "How did ur mother die?" The answer is murder, and urged on by curiosity and the mysterious texter, Hunt takes on a case he never knew existed, one that has lain unsolved for decades. Hunt's birth father, twice tried but never convicted of the murder, is in...