Chosen Family

Nell Argall and Eve Bowman meet as first-years at a brutal posh girls' school in Sydney, two clever, odd, friendless outsiders who recognize something of themselves in each other. A shared adolescent trauma seals a bond that will shape the rest of their lives, and over the next eighteen years — through university, careers, lovers, and the slow discovery of who they each are — they remain the fixed point in each other's orbit.

At the novel's heart is a radical proposition: what if the family you choose could replace the one you're expected to build? When Nell and Eve decide to raise a child together as platonic best friends, they test whether love outside the traditional romantic script can hold — against the pull of other relationships, old wounds, guilt, jealousy, and the ordinary erosions of time.

Chosen Family, the second novel from Green Dot author Madeleine Gray, is an intense, funny, and unsparing study of a lifelong friendship. Spanning decades and steeped in queer adolescence and unconventional parenthood, it asks what we owe the people we choose, and how much a love this fierce can bear before it breaks.