My Best Friend's Girl

Kamryn Matika and Adele Brannon had been best friends since university, until Adele slept with Kamryn's fiancé, Nate, and the two women became strangers. Two years later, Adele contacts Kamryn from a hospital bed: she is dying, and she wants Kamryn to adopt her five-year-old daughter, Tegan.

Grief-stricken and wholly unprepared for motherhood, Kamryn brings Tegan into her life anyway, navigating a new city, a demanding job, other people's assumptions about the mixed-race child in her care, and her own unresolved feelings about Nate, Tegan's biological father. A tentative romance with her boss, Luke, complicates things further.

My Best Friend's Girl follows Kamryn's slow journey from resentment toward forgiveness and an unlikely, hard-won version of family. Published by Dorothy Koomson in 2006, it was selected for the Richard & Judy Summer Reads book club the same year.