My Darling Daughter
Fifteen years ago, Susie Jukes gave up her baby daughter for adoption. She has never stopped thinking about her. So when a teenager named Anna contacts her out of the blue through social media, Susie is overwhelmed—this is the child she lost, now grown, reaching out at last.
But the reunion doesn't unfold the way Susie imagined. Anna's account of her home life strikes Susie and her husband, Gabe, as strange, and when Anna's adoptive parents react with alarm to the mere fact of contact, Susie becomes convinced the girl is in danger and needs rescuing. The question is whether she's reading the situation clearly, or whether her own longing—and the secrets she's kept buried for fifteen years—are distorting everything she sees.
A twisty domestic thriller from J.P. Delaney, the author of The Girl Before, My Darling Daughter turns the ache of a birth mother's love into a tense, uneasy story about adoption, obsession, and the way trauma echoes from one generation to the next. Nothing here is quite what it first appears.
A birth mother reunited with the teenage daughter she gave up for adoption, increasingly convinced the girl needs saving.
The fifteen-year-old who contacts Susie; her true situation and motives are the novel's central puzzle.
Susie's husband, drawn into the fraught reunion.
