Published in 2025
9 hours and 37 minutes
Claire Adam’s debut novel, Golden Child, was published by Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP for Hogarth. It was listed as one of the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” and was awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and the McKitterick Prize. She was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She studied physics at Brown University and later received an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Adam lives in London.
What is this book about?
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.
When, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch, saying that she might be Dawn’s long-lost daughter, it stirs 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?
