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Fiction featuring Care Experience Amy's Children Olga Masters 1987 Australian writer Olga Masters (1919-1986) classic novel Amy's Children was first published in 1987. In the 2013 edition published by Text Classics, another Australian writer, Eva Sallis (b. 1964), writes: “Amy’s Children is … a rich portrait of inner Sydney-life… [during] wartime Australia…We experience the small lives of is characters without judgement…Amy herself does much for which she would have been condemned, then and now.” After 3 years of marriage, 20-year-old Amy is abandoned by her husband and then she abandons her 3 daughters, leaving them in the care of their grandparents while she heads to Sydney to get a job and a place of her own. “There is no room for the children she had while still barely out of childhood herself.” Eventually the eldest of Amy’s children, 15-year-old Kathleen, joins her in Sydney. Even then Amy finds it difficult to admit the child is hers. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Sword Catcher Cassandra Clare 2023 The Sword Catcher tells the story of Kel. Kel is an orphan stolen from the orphanage he is living in to be the body-double of heir to the throne, Prince Conor Aurelian. Kel and Conor grow up together and become close friends. Except that Kel lives with the knowledge that his role is to die for Conor. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Friend in Need Elizabeth Coxhead 1957 Isobel Fairlie is a child welfare officer who provides amusing sketches of the ‘deprived and delinquent’ children she works with. Isobel 's early success as ‘a sort of paid interferer’ is effortless as she involves the lives and affections of the most difficult children, the most hopeless parents, even her own friends and perfect strangers, in each others’ problems even though there is a cost. (Available to read online, see link) External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro 2010 Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is the best-known novel of the 4 written by African American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). The novel tells the story of Janie Crawford who was raised in the kinship care of her maternal grandmother, Nanny. Janie Crawford is a confident, middle-aged Black woman who returns to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida after being away for years. She explains that she was raised by her grandmother, who, influenced by her life as a slave and what happened to her daughter, wants Janie to marry an older man, a farmer named Logan Killicks, who can provide Janie with security and social states. But Jane is miserable with Logan and runs off with another man. According to the Zora Neale Hurston website: “When first published in 1937, this novel about a proud, independent black woman was generally dismissed by male reviewers. Out of print for almost thirty years, but since its reissue…in 1978, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.” External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Aunt's House Elizabeth Stead 2019 The protagonist of Elizabeth Stead's The Aunts' House (2019) is 11 year old orphan, Angel Martin. When the story opens - it's 1942 - Angel's mother has just died and 'bequeathed' her daughter to 'Missus Potts' who runs a boarding house where a melange of Dickensian type characters live and where the food is bad even for wartime Sydney. Angel Martin is a delightful character. She is feisty, forthright, resourceful, intelligent, determined. She needs to be too, as there are aunts who'd prefer not to acknowledge Angel's existence, men who molest her, and Missus Potts who insists the child earns her keep. There are, also, however, kind and caring characters too, including a porter at the Art Gallery and tram drivers. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience That They May Face the Rising Sun John McGahern 2002 The last book written by Irish writer, John McGahern (1934-2006), includes a Care Experienced character, Bill Edwards. "That They May Face the Rising Sun" (2002) tells the story of a year in the of Joe and Kate Ruttledge who have moved from London to live a rural life in Ireland. One of the people they welcome into their home is Bill Edwards, an odd character. Everyone knows that Bill was in a Catholic children's home, that he was sent out to work on a farm at the age of 14 and that he ran away from that first 'placement' because of maltreatment. Joe has a chat with Bill one day about his experiences which is too much for Bill. "Stop torturing me" he cried out (p.13). By the end of the book, the local priest is organising a small apartment for Bill in the city. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Switherby Pilgrims Eleanor Spence 2005 In 1825, concerned for the future of her ten orphan charges in the grim factory towns of their native England, Miss Arabella Braithewaite, known to the children as Missabella, decides to take a land grant in Australia and makes the long, daunting journey with her wards to the austere bush country of New South Wales. External Website

Films/Videos De Tweeling (Twin Sisters) ​ 2002 De Tweeling (Twin Sisters) based on the novel The Twins by Tessa de Loo. Twin sisters Lotte (Thekla Reuten) and Anna Bamberg (Nadja Uhl) are raised separately after their parents die. Lotte goes to live with rich relatives in the Netherlands, while Anna stays in Germany, enduring poverty on the farm of her stoic uncle. As adults, the pair long to reunite. But the outbreak of World War II, as well as growing social differences between them, risk keeping the two sisters permanently divided -- especially when Anna marries a Nazi officer. Only in her old age, when they meet again at a spa and after Anna's death, does Lotte reconcile herself to their divergent lives and reclaim the tender sibling feeling of her childhood. The two girls/women are each played by three different actors from the Netherlands and Germany. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Care leavers met with Jacqueline Wilson to debate the true reality of care Eve Livingston 2018 When the latest book about Tracy Beaker saw her end up in a less than fairytale adult life, there was anger from many who'd had childhoods in care. The Big Issue arranged for her creator Jacqueline Wilson to meet care-experienced readers to hear why they felt cheated External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience All the Murmuring Bones Angela Slatter 2021 Orphaned as a young child, Mirin O'Malley has been brought up by her grandparents on their isolated, rambling estate Hob's Hallow. Long ago her family... External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors The Queen's Gambit (novel) Walter Tevis 2020 When she is sent to an orphanage at the age of eight, Beth Harmon soon discovers two ways to escape her surroundings, albeit fleetingly: playing chess and taking the little green pills given to her and the other children to keep them subdued. Before long, it becomes apparent that hers is a prodigious talent, and as she progresses to the top of the US chess rankings she is able to forge a new life for herself. But she can never quite overcome her urge to self-destruct. For Beth, there's more at stake than merely winning and losing. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Lost Child Caryl Phillips 2015 The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its centre is Monica Johnson, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Intertwined with her modern narrative is the ragged childhood of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights and one of literature’s most enigmatic lost boys. The Lost Child is bookended by two scenes that feature the seven-year-old Heathcliff. Left purposefully mysterious by Emily Brontë, his origins are here fleshed out by Phillips, who makes him the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw by an African former slave. In the early scene, the boy’s mother is dying of disease in Liverpool; the novel ends with her son being led over the moors by Mr Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights. External Website

Films/Videos December Boys ​ 2007 Based on the 1963 novel by Michael Noon of the same name, this 2007 film explores the holiday adventures of 4 orphan boys. Over the course of the summer, the boys come to realise they are a family and don't wish to be adopted. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Round House Louise Erdrich 2016 A mother is brutally raped by a man on their North Dakota reservation where she lives with her husband and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. Traumatized and afraid, she takes to her bed and refuses to talk to anyone - including the police. While her husband, a tribal judge, endeavours to wrest justice from a situation that defies his keenest efforts, young Joe's world shifts on its child's axis. Confused, and nursing a complicated fury, Joe sets out to find answers that might put his mother's attacker behind bars - and make everything right again. Or so he hopes. An important aspect of The Round House is an adoption story, the story of a white woman who grows up in Native America after she is rejected at birth by her mother. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Lost for words Stephanie Butland 2017 Lost for Words features a care experienced character who is intelligent, articulate, a lover of words and books and of course feisty, vulnerable and not a stereotype. Loveday Cardew prefers books to people. If you look closely, you might glimpse the first lines of the novels she loves most tattooed on her skin. But there are things she'll never show you. Fifteen years ago Loveday lost all she knew and loved in one unspeakable night that led to her being taken into foster care.Now, she finds refuge in the unique little York bookshop where she works. Everything is about to change for Loveday. Someone knows about her past. Someone is trying to send her a message. And she can't hide any longer.-- External Website

Children's Non-fiction Marilyn Monroe Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara 2021 Little Norma Jeane grew up between foster homes, an orphanage, and a family friend’s house – where she was forbidden from watching movies. Through her difficult childhood and teen years, she dreamed of becoming an actress. One day a photographer spotted her and gave her a modelling contract, and from this day she was ‘Marilyn Monroe’. She was much-admired but suffered from pre-performance anxiety, which was a challenge for her in her career. Her films grossed over $200 million but she was known to have said: ‘I don't want to make money. I just want to be wonderful.’ This inspiring book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the star’s life. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors The Panopticon Jenni Fagan 2013 The Panopticon is a circular prison with cells so constructed that the prisoners can be observed at all times. Anais Hendricks, fifteen, is in the back of a police car, headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders. She cannot remember the events that led her here, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and there is blood on Anais' school uniform. Smart, funny and fierce, Anais is a counter-culture outlaw, a bohemian philosopher in sailor shorts and a pillbox hat. She is also a child who has been let down, or worse, by just about every adult she has ever met. The residents of the Panopticon form intense bonds, heightened by their place on the periphery, and Anais finds herself part of an ad hoc family there. Much more suspicious are the social workers, especially Helen, who is about to leave her job for an elephant sanctuary in India but is determined to force Anais to confront the circumstances of her birth before she goes. Looking up at the watchtower that looms over the residents, Anais knows her fate: she is part of an experiment, she always was, it's a given, a liberty - a fact. And the experiment is closing in. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Foster Child: Jenny Blackhurst 2017 When child psychologist Imogen Reid takes on the case of 11-year-old Ellie Atkinson, she refuses to listen to warnings that the girl is dangerous. Ellie was the only survivor of a fire that killed her family. Imogen is convinced she's just a sad and angry child struggling to cope with her loss. But Ellie's foster parents and teachers are starting to fear her. When she gets upset, bad things seem to happen. And as Imogen gets closer to Ellie, she may be putting herself in danger... External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Chocolate Maker's Wife Karen Brooks 2020 When Rosamund Tomkins enters the world she is so different, with her darkling eyes and strange laughter, that the midwives are afraid, believing her a changeling. But Rosamund's life is set to be anything but enchanted. In 1600s England, Rosamund Tompkins is the “illegitimate” daughter of a nobleman working as a servant in a country inn. Her stepfather and brothers are abusive, and she works under him at the inn. It is only when she is married off to a nobleman that her life undergoes a wondrous transformation. Clever, quick and irrepressible, Rosamund soon becomes the darling of the haut ton, and presides over her luxurious chocolate house where the rich go to be seen and indulge in their favourite pastime, drinking the sweet and heady drink to which they've become oddly addicted. But in the shadows a web of conspiracy is spinning. The return of a man from the past brings Rosamund into mortal peril and up to the brink of destruction. As she fights for her life and those she loves through the ravages of the Plague and London's Great Fire, Rosamund begins to realise she will be forced to make a choice: walk away from all she knows and has grown to love with her soul intact, or make a deal with the devil... External Website