My Best Friend's Girl

Kamryn Matika and Adele Brannon were close friends from their university days. Then Adele slept with Kamryn's fiancé, Nate, and the friendship ended. Two years on, a call comes from a hospital bed: Adele is dying and asks Kamryn to adopt her five-year-old daughter, Tegan.

Kamryn is grieving and has no idea how to be a mother, but she takes Tegan in. Nate is Tegan's biological father, and Kamryn has not settled her feelings about him. Around her, a new city, a demanding job and strangers' assumptions about the mixed-race child in her care add to the strain.

A tentative romance with her boss, Luke, adds another complication. The novel is contemporary women's fiction, told with an emotional focus on family, betrayal and forgiveness, and it moves at the slow pace of a character changing over time.

Koomson published it in 2006, and it was chosen for the Richard & Judy Summer Reads book club that year. The question it turns on is whether Kamryn can let go of her resentment enough to build a family with a child who comes from the worst betrayal of her life.