Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels (2014) explores the figure of the orphan in American literature and culture.

The authors - Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella & Helena Walstrom – are academics who were funded by the Swedish Research Council to undertake this collaborative project.

They examine novels by writers such as Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison & Octavia Butler to examine how contemporary orphan characters are linked to literary history and national myths even as they critique ideas of family & national belonging. The authors argue that the orphan figure is used to reflect broader socio-cultural anxieties in the USA.