Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Claire Adam, author of Love Forms, about forced delivery in Venezuela and testing the mother-child bond in fiction.

Love Forms, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, centers on Dawn, a 58 year old mother of two grown sons. She finds herself returning to her past and a secret she has kept for many years. When Dawn was 16, her parents sent her from Trinidad to Venezuela to have a baby and give her up for adoption. She’s now trying to track down the daughter she gave up, which leads her to retrace her journey from Trinidad to Venezuela to London, and question not only that fateful decision she made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.

Claire Adam’s debut novel, Golden Child, was listed as one of the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” and was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. She was born and raised in Trinidad. She studied physics at Brown University and later received an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives in London.

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