Forty years on, a Trinidadian woman has never stopped looking for the daughter she gave up for adoption, in a quietly devastating novel
C
laire Adam’s 2019 novel Golden Child was her debut, but it felt like the work of a master. It was tender, ravishing, shattering – you believed every word of it. The book had an effortless narrative authority that most first-time novelists would kill for.
Love Forms is every bit as alive and convincing, and returns us to Trinidad, with its potent fizz of colour, heat and political instability. But unlike the earlier book, it’s also set partly in south London – the writer’s own home turf – and has a mother, rather than a father, at its heart.
Dawn, our “white, young, rich” narrator, is the youngest child of a well-known Trinidadian fruit juice dynasty. At 16, after a brief encounter with a tourist at carnival in Trinidad, she finds herself pregnant. Petrified of the stigma, her otherwise caring parents make a “pact” never to speak of it again, dispatching her, under cover of darkness, on a terrifying and chillingly evoked boat trip to Venezuela. Here she spends four months with nuns who deliver her baby – a girl she never sees again – then is returned to Trinidad to resume her schooling as if nothing has happened.
