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Claire Adam
Love Forms - released 2nd September 2025
Love Forms - released 2nd September 2025
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In the heart-aching new novel from the author of the award-winning Golden Child, a mother searches for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago.
Susan's Review
A sixteen-year-old girl is hauled into a tiny boat in the dead of night, terrified that she will be drowned or murdered crossing the stretch of water from Trinidad to Venezuela. But while the opening to Love Forms echoes the hazardous journeys of refugees, young Dawn Bishop belongs to an affluent, seemingly happy Trinidadian family, granted the freedom for the first time to attend a riotous annual carnival without parental supervision. Naively seeking a sexual experience as proof of her adulthood, she is unceremoniously impregnated by a tourist whose name she will be unable to remember. Her journey across the water, then, is not an escape from persecution but a plan hatched by her parents to save them and their sons from public shame. In Venezuela, Dawn will give birth in an alien place and be forced to relinquish her baby. Confused and afraid, she will agree to the ‘pact’ commanded by her angry father to never speak of what she has done.
At first Dawn not only adheres to the pact; she also appears, as her mother instructed, to have “moved on.” She graduates as a medical doctor, settles in London, marries and becomes a mother of two sons. But the past nevertheless returns to her, and with it, a refusal to be silent. Lost Forms, narrated in the first person by an adult Dawn, now recently divorced and no longer working as a doctor, is addressed to an unknown “you.” Is Dawn speaking directly to us, or to the child she has lost? Or is she speaking to her family, explicitly defying her parents? Whatever the case, her monologue, interspersed with fully dramatised scenes, creates a sense of intimacy with the reader: Dawn asks us to understand what was done to her when she was little more than a child herself.
But Love Forms takes an unexpected psychological approach to this search for meaning. While Dawn’s voice is for the most part measured in its immersion in daily life, her literal and metaphoric return to her past is enacted not through a predictable series of nightmares or fragments of memory; nor does she feel particularly disappointed when her attempts to locate her daughter prove unsuccessful. But what finally allows her to fully confront her past, and understand what matters to her, and why, is both strikingly unpredictable and profoundly moving.
The novel is also a wonderful evocation of Dawn’s Trinidad homeland: its physical beauty and rituals, the underlying threat of criminality and violence, and class and racial differences within the community. It’s a complex portrait of a vital and dynamic society which stands in stark contrast to Dawn’s London life of virtual anonymity and loneliness. While Love Forms is not an autobiographical novel, Trinidad-born Claire Adam, now based in London, has clearly drawn on her personal experiences to create two radically different and convincing locations and ways of life. Among the many questions it raises about motherhood, migration and family, the novel also asks to reflection where we might, if at all, find a home.
Love Forms, recently longlisted for the Booker Prize, will be released in Australia in September. You can pre-order a copy at the Lane Bookshop.
Publisher Review
'From very first page, I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller. An utterly arresting tale of love and grief, of the wounding and healing powers of family, of the many guises of a mother's love. It's an absolute triumph.'
SARA COLLINS
Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption.
Dawn tries to carry on with her life - a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce - but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been.
Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn's long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer?
'Exquisitely written. A compelling and tender story of what-and who-is hidden in almost every family that feels as old as the hills and yet acutely contemporary.'
MONIQUE ROFFEY
'An arresting voice that made me think of silk: its delicate beauty belies its intrinsic strength.'
CLAIRE KILROY
'A compelling read taking us to the heart of difficult family situations and evocative secret places.'
ROMESH GUNESEKERA
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