About Love Forms

Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

A Book of the Year in The Times, The Critic, News 24, and NPR.

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.

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?

A copy of the book "Love Forms" by Claire Adam with a floral cover, placed on a yellow checkered table. Nearby, there is a red pen, a pen with a gold clip, a box of chocolates, and some chocolate shavings. In the top left corner, there is a stack of cards or papers in a box and a logo with the text "The Booker Prize 2025" and the hashtag "#BookerPrize2025".
Graphic of a book with the text 'The Booker Prize 2025 Longlisted'
Book cover for 'Love Forms' by Claire Adam, featuring a torn-paper collage with a green background, a peeled mandarin orange, a peeled lemon, and a blue textured element.

  • "In the gripping and heart-rending latest from Adam (Golden Child), a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption decades earlier. ... Readers won't want to put this one down."

    —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review.

  • "The final pages... are as gripping as any thriller, and the ending, when it comes, feels as right as it is devastating."

    —GUARDIAN

  • "A quietly devastating masterpiece. I rarely cry but I howled."

    —Marian Keyes

  • "Though Ms. Adam is a different sort of stylist, she produces echoes of Jean Rhys"

    -THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  • "Love Forms achieves a sort of alchemy."

    —FINANCIAL TIMES

  • "An unforgettable heartache of a novel."

    —VOGUE

  • "Love Forms is a novel of cumulative force. There's no catharsis or revelation, just the quiet pressure of the past pushing against the present."

    -THE IRISH TIMES

As featured in:

THE TIMES

People magazine Claire Adam Love Forms When my mother-daughter novel needed a cover, I knew just the artist: My mom (exclusive)

PEOPLE

SERVICE95

FABER JOURNAL

“From the very first pages, I knew I was in the hands of a master. An absolute triumph.”
— Sara Collins, author of 'The Confessions of Frannie Langton'
“The most beautiful, heartbreaking ending I’ve read since Never Let Me Go.”
— Julianne Pachico, author of 'Jungle House'

Watch / listen:

BBC Radio 4 with Kirsty Wark

People magazine Claire Adam Love Forms When my mother-daughter novel needed a cover, I knew just the artist: My mom (exclusive)

RTE Arena with Rick O’Shea

Faber Members (video)

This Mama is Lit! (Podcast)

Some interviews:

The Times

People magazine Claire Adam Love Forms When my mother-daughter novel needed a cover, I knew just the artist: My mom (exclusive)

The Observer

The Hindu

Trinidad & Tobago Guardian

“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, Costa Award-winning author of 'The Mermaid of Black Conch'
“Adam’s writing has a hypnotic force. Love Forms is astonishing, remarkable in its slow, urgent unfolding –and in the almost palpable presence of its narrator.”
— Chetna Maroo, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of 'Western Lane'
“The most beautiful, heartbreaking ending I’ve read since Never Let Me Go.”
— Julianne Pachico, author of 'Jungle House'
“An arresting voice that made me think of silk: its delicate beauty belies its intrinsic strength.”
— Claire Kilroy, Women's Prize-shortlisted author of 'Soldier, Sailor'.
Buy Love Forms