Biography Adoption

After two years of waiting to adopt - slogging through paperwork and bouncing between hope and despair - a miracle finally happened for Vanessa McGrady. Her sweet baby, Grace, was a dream come true. Then Vanessa made a highly uncommon gesture: when Grace’s biological parents became homeless, Vanessa invited them to stay. Without a blueprint for navigating the practical basics of an open adoption or any discussion of expectations or boundaries, the unusual living arrangement became a bottomless well of conflicting emotions and increasingly difficult decisions.

Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she's sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again.

In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea. After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart when he disappeared before the job was done. Despite COVID-19, the promise of what she might discover—the possibility that her biological mother was her kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own—was too tempting.

What does it take to keep a child safe? As a long-time strategist and activist fighting for better outcomes for foster children, Mark Daley thought he knew the answer. But when Ethan and Logan, an adorable infant and a precocious toddler, entered their lives, Mark and his husband Jason quickly realized they were not remotely prepared for the uncertainty and complication of foster parenting.

The Only Way Forward Is Back is a riveting account of perseverance, sacrificial love, and transformative grace. It invites us to view our personal stories through the lens of a literal and spiritual orphan who learned to hold fast to his identity as God’s beloved child—and inspires each one of us to do the same.

The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress's Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.

Magnanimous and charming, Bob Guterl knew that he could solve the racial problems bedeviling postwar America. Determined to stave off impending global catastrophe, the larger-than-life judge and his resolute wife, Sheryl, launched a radical experiment, raising their two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, Vietnam, and the South Bronx―the so-called “war zones of the American century”―in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence in small-town New Jersey.

What We Wished For: An Adoption Story shares a woman’s quest to build a loving family. It is a tale of courage, perseverance, and what remains when things don’t go as imagined. This memoir speaks to anyone who has ever struggled with a life-altering decision, one from which there is no turning back.

As she closes the door on her stunningly successful television show, Rosie O' Donnell opens her heart to share the amazing experience that changed her life forever. "An enormously powerful story," says Publishers Weekly, "about how forces strong enough to shatter one person can make another shine like a diamond."

The 11th memoir and latest title from the internationally bestselling author and foster carer Cathy Glass. This book tells the true story of Cathy's adopted daughter Lucy. Lucy was born to a single mother who had been abused and neglected for most of her own childhood. Right from the beginning Lucy's mother couldn't cope, but it wasn't until Lucy reached eight years old that she was finally taken into permanent foster care.

In the much-anticipated follow-up to Sunday Times best seller Trapped, foster carer Rosie Lewis tells the heartbreaking true story of Zadie. When the young teenage girl, thrown out of her home by her strict Muslim family, is discovered hiding on the city streets by the police, it is clear that all is not as it should be. Taught to believe that Westerners should not be trusted, when Zadie is initially delivered into the experienced hands of foster carer Rosie, she is understandably suspicious of the family around her.

Tim and Michelle Orr were married for 16 years before adopting their daughter, Faith, who happens to have Down syndrome. Tim's new book, We Named Her Faith: How we became a gospel-centered family, contains the story of their life together before she came to live with them. Tim weaves stories of how he overcame the childhood trauma of having multiple birth defects, a difficult home life, and alcoholism with teaching about living a gospel-centered life. Michelle's life met with difficulties early on as she was born to teenage parents. Through these experiences, Tim shares their firm belief ...

At only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia. Despite his gratitude, Brierley always wondered about his origins.

When a notorious lawyer, at the request of a famed composer, meticulously conceals his origins, his adoptive mother takes every measure to bury the truth. Pulling strings and enlisting influential allies—including a television icon—she constructs a carefully crafted facade to ensure he never uncovers his past. But as he grows older, cracks in the carefully constructed facade begin to show, leaving him haunted by an unsettling sense that something is being hidden from him.

Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well. This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth.

This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.

Michael Reagan's life is much more than just an interesting story. It is a testimony of how Christ allowed him to find healing from many of the issues that confront our culture today, such as sexual abuse, divorce, loneliness, the feeling of rejection, and the belief that God does not care about us. Michael Reagan's first adoption gave him an identity, but he did not find his true identity until he found Christ.

In the tradition of The Promise of a Pencil and Kisses from Katie comes an inspirational memoir by the founder of Comfort Cases about his turbulent childhood in the foster care system and the countless obstacles and discrimination he endured in adopting his four children.

Let the Wildflowers Grow: One Mother's Journey through Adoption, Attachment and Borderline Personality Disorder is a beautiful story of mother-daughter love that turns to anguish in the challenges of mental health. It follows the poignant narrative of Brigitte Becker, who along with her husband and son, open their heart and home to a bright, beautiful ten-year-old from Ukraine named Anna, embarking together on a journey of adjusting this cherished young girl to the United States.

Experience the profound journey of one woman's quest for identity as she unravels the mystery of her adoption and birth family. As she navigates the complexity of heritage vs. lineage, nature vs. nurture, and the ramifications of adoption and DNA testing, listeners see that uncovering truth can be both painful and exhilarating.