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Fiction featuring Care Experience The Memoirs of a Survivor Doris Lessing 1974 The Memoirs of a Survivor is a dystopian novel. A future modern city is falling apart and there are gangs of people trying to survive in the face of food shortages and swarms of rats. An unnamed narrator—middle-aged, well-educated—is watching this from inside her flat. One day a 12 year old girl, Emily Cartright, is left with her. Where the narrator is considering migrating too, now she feels compelled to stay. As she takes the task of caring for Emily seriously, Emily also provides the opportunity for the narrator to reflect on her own childhood and adolescence. In effect, the narrator comes to mother herself. Aside from Emily, there’s a home for other children in the story, a home where Emily spends considerable time caring for children whose parents have died or abandoned them. Gerald—likely modelled on Roger Diski, Jenny’s one time husband—a young man in his early 20s, has set this up External Website

Films/Videos A Little Princess (Film) ​ 2020 A Little Princess is a 1995 American family drama film directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Set during World War I, it focuses on a young girl who is relegated to a life of servitude in a New York City boarding school by the headmistress after receiving news that her father was killed in combat. Loosely based upon the 1905 novel A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, this adaptation was heavily influenced by the 1939 cinematic version and takes creative liberties with the original story. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Half A World Away Mike Gayle ​ Kerry Hayes is a single mum, living in a tough London estate. She provides for her son by cleaning houses she could never afford. Taken into care as a child, Kerry cannot forget her past. Noah Martineau is a successful barrister with a beautiful wife, daughter and home in fashionable Primrose Hill. Adopted as a young child, Noah never looks back. When Kerry contacts Noah, the sibling she lost on the day they were torn apart as children, she sets in motion a chain of events that will change both of their lives forever. 'Kerry is not depicted as less able than Noah, despite growing up in care. So often cared for characters are a shorthand for an emotional mess and actually in this novel that was reversed.' External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Grace and Mary Melvyn Bragg 2013 John visits his aging mother in her nursing home and tries to revive her ailing memory with the use of songs, photos and questions. Interwoven with John's visits to Mary is the story of Grace, a farm labourer’s daughter, who fell pregnant in 1917 and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter – Mary, who she was forced to give her away at birth. He finds out about the history of childhood displacement in his family, with both his mother and his grandmother. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Everlasting Sunday Robert Lukins 2018 England, 1962. Seventeen-year-old Radford arrives at Goodwin Manor, a home for boys who have ‘been found by trouble’. Watched over by the enigmatic Teddy. Life at the Manor offers a fragile peace at best, as the coldest winter in three centuries sets in. Radford learns that the boys are to care for each other, since their families and the law have been unable to do so. But will this be enough when tragedy strikes? At once both beautiful and brutal, The Everlasting Sunday is an unforgettable debut novel about growing up, growing wild and the shifting nature of friendship. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Born in a Burial Gown M.W. Craven 2020 The only witness to the dumping of a body is Care Experienced character Darren Ackers, a drug addicted. Without him it is likely the killer would never have been caught. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Sixkill Robert B Parker 2012 A bad-boy movie star named Jumbo pushes the limits of his reputation when he's accused of rape and murder. When the Boston PD calls on Spencer, he meets Jumbo's young bodyguard, Zebulon Sixkill, and the two form an unlikely alliance. It's a high profile case for Spenser, but the Hollywood secrets he uncovers are sordidly unsavory- and not just those of the accused... Zebulon Sixkill was in kinship care as a child, living with his grandfather after his father disappeared and his mother died when Z was 10. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors Eden's lost Sumner Locke Elliott 1970 A family saga. 16 year old Angus Weekes goes to live with the St James family when his guardian dies. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Drawing on Childhood: New exhibition examines why so many of our most cherished fictional heroes are orphans | The Independent Etan Smallman 2016 A review of the Drawing on Childhood Exhibition at the Foundling Museum External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles From the first admissions: How care has changed in 280 years Carol Homden 2021 A history of Coram and changes in thinking about children in care over time. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Lily: A Tale of Revenge Rose Tremain 2021 Lily tells the story of a foundling left in 1850 at the London Foundling Hospital. The baby is saved from wolves by a young police officer, Sam Trench. Named Lily Mortimer for a Foundling Hospital benefactor, the baby is then taken to a family at Rookery Farm in Suffolk where she is well cared for by her foster parents and foster siblings and the small child contributes as best she can to the work of the farm. Foster mother, Nellie Buck, is delighted to have a girl and teaches her needlework, a useful skill that the protagonist, 16-year-old and independent Lily, employs in her job as a wig maker at Belle Prettywood’s Wig Emporium. When she is returned to the Foundling Hospital at the age of 6, Lily misses her foster family greatly and arranges with a young friend, Bridget—both girls are now 7 years of age—to run away. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Subjects Sarah Hopkins 2019 Daniel is a sixteen-year-old drug dealer and he's going to jail. Then, suddenly, he's not. A courtroom intervention. A long car ride to a big country house. Other 'gifted delinquents'- the elusive, devastating Rachel, and Alex, so tightly wound he seems about to shatter. So where are they? It's not a school, despite the 'lessons' with the headsets and changing images. It's not a psych unit-not if the absence of medication means anything. It's not a jail, because Daniel's free to leave. Or that's what they tell him. He knows he and the others are part of an experiment. But he doesn't know who's running it or what they're trying to prove. And he has no idea what they're doing to him. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel Louis Bayard 2006 The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (2006) is an American mystery thriller by Louis Bayard. Set in 1830, retired detective Augustus Landor is asked to investigate the death of a cadet at the West Point military academy. Landor enlists the help of another cadet, Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe was in foster care as a child, and he was also at West Point as a young man. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Secret of Lost Things Sheridan Hay 2011 At eighteen, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city she's read so much about. The moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff owner, Mr. Pike, gives her a job sorting through huge piles of books and helping the rest of the staff – a group as odd and idiosyncratic as the characters in a Dickens novel. There's Pearl, the loving, motherly transsexual who runs the cash register; Oscar, who shares his extensive, eclectic knowledge with Rosemary, but furiously rejects her attempts at a more personal relationship; and Arthur Pick, who supervises the art section and demonstrates a particular interest in photography books featuring naked men. The store manager Walter Geist is an albino, a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade. When Walter's eyesight begins to fail, Rosemary becomes his assistant. And so it is Rosemary who first reads the letter from someone seeking to ‘place’ a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Patience Toby Litt 2019 Meet Elliott. Elliott is hugely intelligent. He's an incredible observer. He has a beautiful and unusual imagination. To know him is to adore him. But Elliott is also stuck. He lives in an orphanage in 1979. He spends his days in a wheelchair, in an empty corridor, or wherever the Catholic Sisters who run the ward have decided to park him. So when Jim, blind and mute but also headstrong, arrives on the ward and begins to defy the Sisters' restrictive rules, Elliott finally sees a chance for escape. Together, they could achieve a magnificent freedom – if only for a few hours. But how can Elliott, unable to move or speak clearly, communicate all this to Jim? How can he even get Jim to know he exists? Patience is a remarkable story of love and friendship, courage and adventure. It is also about finding joy in the most unlikely of settings. Elliott and Jim are going to have fun. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Sun Walks Down Fiona McFarlane 2022 The Sun Walks Down (2022) by Australian writer, Fiona McFarlane, tells the story of a colonial Flinders Rangers, South Australia community searching for – or talking about if not actively searching - a missing 6-year-old boy. The cast of characters include Aboriginal Australian trackers and servants, Muslim cameleers, German born landowners, a visiting artist from Sweden, and Anglo-Australian children, policemen and teachers. McFarlane addresses well the traumatic effect for young Denny Wallace of being separated from his family. When a couple take care of him briefly—finding him asleep near their camp one morning—he is terrified they want to steal him. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles On Killing Charles Dickens Zadie Smith 2023 Here’s another article about the pervasive and ongoing influence of Charles Dickens. Finally deciding on the historical novel she wanted to write, Zadie Smith tried to avoid including Charles Dickens. However, she found he was everywhere: “I’d read a book about American slavery and discover him in the footnotes!” Eventually Dickens became a character in the story Zadie Smith was telling about Arthur Orton, who claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, a long missing heir. “I let him pervade the pages, in the same way he stalks through nineteenth-century London. He’s there in the air and the comedy and the tragedy and the politics and the literature” External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Fall of Man in Wilmslow David Lagercrantz 2009 Swedish writer David Lagercrantz is the author of 3 novels in the Millennium series - The Girl in the Spider's Web, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for Eye and The Girl Who Lived Twice. The Fall of Man in Wilmslow (2009) is an imagined account of a young Detective Constable Leonard Corell being tasked with investigating the death of Alan Turing on 7 June 1954. Corell becomes fascinated and inspired by the life and character of Turing and uncovers his crucial work during WWII at Bletchley Park. The novel explores the idea of being 'different' enabling the development of different ideas, attitudes towards gay men at the time, and the hypocrisy of the secret service being willing to use Turing until they confirm he is gay. There is little on Alan Turing's extended time in foster care as an infant and small child and how that experience might have shaped the man. External Website

Children's Fiction Henderson's Boys Robert Muchamore 2009 Henderson's Boys is another series of young adult spy novels written by Robert Muchamore, this time about the beginning of CHERUB. Muchamore writes on his website: "The world of Henderson's Boys is rougher and more dangerous than CHERUB. Instead of drug dealers and terrorists the enemy is a brutal Nazi regime that will torture and kill young agents if they're captured. I hope you enjoy meeting Charles Henderson and the first CHERUB agents!" https://www.muchamore.com/hendersons-boys External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors The Hobbit J R R Tolkien 2013 The Hobbit is the unforgettable story of Bilbo, a peace-loving hobbit, who embarks on a strange and magical adventure. A timeless classic. Frodo Baggins was born in the Shire on 22nd September 1368 (SR). He shares his birthday – though not date of birth – with his 'uncle' Bilbo Baggins (Master of Bag End in Hobbiton). He was orphaned at the age of 12, when his parents, Drogo and Primula Baggins, drowned in a boating accident on the Brandywine. Bilbo Baggins enjoys a quiet and contented life, with no desire to travel far from the comforts of home; then one day the wizard Gandalf and a band of dwarves arrive unexpectedly and enlist his services – as a burglar – on a dangerous expedition to raid the treasure-hoard of Smaug the dragon. Bilbo’s life is never to be the same again. External Website