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Fiction featuring Care Experience Quieter Than Killing Sarah Hilary 2017 It's winter, the nights are dark and freezing, and a series of assaults is pulling DI Marnie Rome and DS Noah Jake out onto streets of London. When Marnie's family home is ransacked, there are signs that the burglary can have only been committed by someone who knows her. Someone out there is playing games. It is time for both Marnie and Noah to face the truth about the creeping, chilling reaches of a troubled upbringing. Five years ago, her family home was the scene of a shocking and bloody crime that left her parents dead and her foster brother in prison. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles ‘Trailblazer’ in the rights movement for children in care. Television Director, Screen writer. Sean Geoghegan 1979 Sean Geoghegan's account of co-founding the National Association of Young People in Care, an association which influenced the 1989 Children's Act. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Good Girl, Bad Girl Michael Robotham (2019) 2019 Good Girl, Bad Girl is the first in Michael Robotham's Cyrus Haven series. Cyrus Haven was in kinship care with his grandparents from the age of 13, after his family was killed by Cyrus' older brother. At the opening to Good Girl, Bad Girl, Haven is introduced to Evie Cormac who’s living in Langford Hall, “a secure children’s home” or youth detention centre in Nottingham. The resident social worker, a friend of Haven’s from university called Guthry, thinks Haven might be able to help Evie, since they have in common a loss of family. Evie has lots of other traumas too. Like having lived in a house with a dead body for months, and then going into the foster care system. Cyrus thinks he can help Evie, although he recognises she has considerable unpacked traumed. Cyrus also discovers that Evie has an uncanny ability to detect the lies that people tell. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Small Things Like These Claire Keegan 2021 In her novella, Small Things Like These (2021), Claire Keegan tells something about the now infamous Magdalene Laundries. Set in 1985 in a small Irish town, local coal merchant, Bill Furlong, is busy organising deliveries in the period leading up to Christmas. Bill Furlong doesn’t want to believe the negative stories he’s heard about the local Laundry. But one day he delivers coal there and is confronted by the scene of unkempt girls and young women scrubbing a floor. One asks for help: she wants Furlong to take her to the river so she can drown herself. Also confronting Furlong is the knowledge that his mother could have been one of those girls, yet she was kept in employment by Mrs Wilson after her baby was born, and 12 year old Bill Furlong stayed on with Mrs Wilson when his mother died. Small Things Like These won the Orwell Prize in 2021 and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Robert B. Parker's Lullaby Ace Atkins 2013 When fourteen-year-old Mattie Sullivan - who is living in kinship care - asks Spenser to look into her mother’s murder, he’s not convinced by her claim that the wrong man was convicted. Mattie is street-smart, wise beyond her years, and now left to care for her younger siblings and an alcoholic grandmother in a dilapidated apartment in South Boston. But her need for closure and her determination to make things right hits Spenser where he lives. As Spenser becomes more involved, he thinks that Mattie may be onto something after all. And he’s going to need the help of his friend Hawk to find peace for Mattie—a job that’s more dangerous than he ever thought. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience No One John Hughes 2019 No One (2019) by Australian writer John Hughes has a former foster child as the narrator. The novella opens with the narrator wondering what he hit with his car one night as he’s driving along Lawson Street, Redfern, Sydney. As he wonders what to do (which never includes going to the police), he recalls standing on Lawson Street as a child “standing there often when I was living in one of the foster home that marked my childhood like fences…” (2). The narrator reflects often on the many foster homes he lived in, including one where the foster father was like a character out of Wake in Fright (1971). He also befriends a young Aboriginal Australian woman he calls the Poetess. All he knows about her is that she grew up with in kinship care and that the scars on her face come from a violent partner. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles The Best Movies About Orphans Anon 2021 Some of the sweetest and most inspirational movies of all time are those that feature the life of a child who has been abandoned by his or her parents, whether through a death or a circumstance such as war. External Website

Children's Non-fiction Stone Mirrors: The Sculpture and Silence of Edmonia Lewis Jeannine Atkins 2017 A sculptor of historical figures starts with givens but creates her own vision. Edmonia Lewis was just such a sculptor, but she never spoke or wrote much about her past, and the stories that have come down through time are often vague or contradictory. Some facts are known: Edmonia was the daughter of an Ojibwe woman who died when she was young. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Ginny Moon Benjamin Ludwig 2017 Ginny is fourteen years old and has autism. She likes the colour red, making lists and knowing exactly what time it is. She doesn’t like hugs, surprises or people telling lies. After years in foster care, she has finally found her forever family. She has a new house, new parents and even a new name. But Ginny also has a Big Secret Plan of Escape. Every day she wakes up at nine o’clock and eats nine grapes for breakfast. Because when she was nine years old something terrible happened. Something only Ginny knows. And she’s the only one who can put it right… External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Orphan Train Christina Baker Kline 2013 Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by pure luck. Would they be adopted by a kind and loving family, or would they face a childhood and adolescence of hard labor and servitude? As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was one such child, sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast of Maine, the memories of her upbringing rendered a hazy blur. But in her attic, hidden in trunks, are vestiges of a turbulent past. Seventeen-year-old Molly Ayer knows that a community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping her out of juvenile hall. But as Molly helps Vivian sort through her keepsakes and possessions, she discovers that she and Vivian aren't as different as they appear. A Penobscot Indian who has spent her youth in and out of foster homes, Molly is also an outsider being raised by strangers, and she, too, has unanswered questions about the past. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine Gail Honeyman 2017 Smart, warm, uplifting, the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes the only way to survive is to open her heart. Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. That, combined with her unusual appearance (scarred cheek, tendency to wear the same clothes year in, year out), means that Eleanor has become a creature of habit (to say the least) and a bit of a loner. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. A mystery surrounds her past and the reader learns that she spent time in care. Everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kind of friends who rescue each other from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond's big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Eyes Like Mine Sheena 2017 This is a review of Eyes Like Mine by Sheena Kamal. Research assistant to a small private investigation outfit in downtown Vancouver, mixed-race Nora Watts takes a 5 a.m. phone call. The grief of a couple in search of their missing daughter is unlikely to improve her lot, particularly when she is hit with the news that the missing girl is the child that she gave up for adoption fifteen years ago. Deciding to search for her daughter brings troubled Nora Watts into contact with a past that she's spent years trying to forget. It's an investigation that takes her on a harrowing journey of deception and violence - one that will eventually lead her to a final showdown with a figure from her own dark past. And all to save a girl she wishes had never been born. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Mr Timothy Louis Bayard (3) 2003 Mr Timothy (2003) by Louis Bayard picks up Tiny Tim's story (from a Christmas Carol) from where Charles Dickens left off. Set in London in 1860, Timothy Cratchit is now a young man of 23, walks with a limp, has "Uncle" Ebenezer has a benefactor and tutors (in reading) a woman who runs a brothel in exchange for accommodation. Inevitably, since the story is set in Dickensian London, there are many street kids and orphans. There are also girls (between ages 8 and 12) being trafficked from Europe into England and the arms of nefarious aristocratic men. Timothy sets out to save one 10 year old girl, orphaned Philomela, in particular and in the process befriends Colin, a 13 year old hustler and talented singer. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Long Bright River Liz Moore 2020 At the heart of Long Bright River, there are two sisters, Mickey and Kacey orphaned when they were young, losing their mother to an overdose death. Their father has not been present in their lives. They have been raised by their grandmother, Gee, who barely was able to provide for their needs, shelter and food, while working several jobs. There wasn’t much love or personal attention shown to the girls and therefore they were extremely close while growing up. Things changed dramatically in high school as Kacey started using drugs. The sisters grew apart, Mickey choosing a career as a policewoman and Kacey working temporary jobs to fund her drug habit. Mickey has tried to keep an eye on her sister as she was usually in the area that she was patrolling in Kensington. There is a serial killer targeting young women. Mickey becomes desperate to find her sister, fearing that she will be the next target. She has vanished and no one seems to know where she is. She becomes desperate and risks the loss of her job and more as she digs deeper into Kacey’s life in the last few months and trying to find the killer. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Parable of the Sower Octavia E. Butler 2019 Octavia Butler (1947–2006) was the renowned author of numerous ground-breaking novels, including Kindred, Wild Seed, and Parable of the Sower. Recipient of the Locus, Hugo and Nebula awards, and a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work, in 1995 she became the first science- fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship ‘Genius Grant’. A pioneer of her genre, Octavia’s dystopian novels explore myriad themes of Black injustice, women’s rights, global warming and political disparity, and her work is taught in over two hundred colleges and universities nationwide. In Parable of the Sower: America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to feel the pain of others as her own, records everything she sees of this broken world in her journal. Then, one terrible night, everything alters beyond recognition, and Lauren must make her voice heard for the sake of those she loves. Soon, her vision becomes reality and her dreams of a better way to live gain the power to change humanity forever. “While I was working off my punishment, I began to hear whispers that I was, indeed, adopted, and that I was the daughter not of rich, important, beautiful people but of the worst heathen devils—murderers, thieves, and perverters of God’s word. The kids started it. There were plenty of kids around who were known to be adopted, so it was commonplace to ridicule them and make up lies about how evil their real parents were. And if you weren’t adopted, and someone got mad at you, they might call you a heathen bastard whether you were or not." The follow-up book is Parable of the Talents: winner of the Nebula Award. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors When the Stars Go Dark Paula McLain 2021 A detective hiding away from the world. A series of disappearances that reach into her past. Can solving them help her heal? Anna Hart is a seasoned missing persons detective in San Francisco with far too much knowledge of the darkest side of human nature. When tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns that a local teenage girl has gone missing. The crime feels frighteningly reminiscent of the most crucial time in Anna's childhood, when the unsolved murder of a young girl touched Mendocino and changed the community forever. Weaving together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical, this propulsive and deeply affecting novel tells a story of fate, necessary redemption, and what it takes, when the worst happens, to reclaim our lives--and our faith in one another. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Clara Morrison Catherine Helen Spence 1854 Clara Morison (1854) is the first novel published by Scottish migrant to South Australia, Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910). As the story opens, 19 year old Clara Morison, who has been living in the kinship care of her uncle for 3 years, is being sent out to South Australia by that uncle. Although Clara was born into the upper-middle classes, in South Australia she has little money. Therefore, one job she takes on (as governess work is rare) is as a servant, work she discovers takes up not only her time, but also her energy. A significant theme in the novel is the 1851 gold rushes in Victoria and NSW. The population of South Australia was significantly reduced as people, mostly men, rushed interstate to try their luck. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Coal River Ellen Marie Wiseman (3) 2015 In Coal River (2015) Wiseman investigates the practice of employing children to work in a coal mine. The protagonist is 19-year-old Emma Malloy who lived in the fictional Coal River, Pennsylvania for 4 months as a child. Her parents have recently died and she returns to Coal River, penniless, to live again with her mother’s sister, Aunt Ida, and her Uncle Otis and cousin Percy. Emma’s relatives are happy to have Emma stay if she works without pay and doesn’t embarrass them by complaining about the many boys who have died or lost limbs working in the mine. Outraged by what she sees, Emma determines to do what she can. She steals from the company store (where the mining community is forced to shop at exorbitant prices) and gives the produce to mining families while also cancelling shoppers’ debts. Emma also conspires with the delightful Clayton Nash (who takes in orphans) to expose the mining company for its illegal and dangerous practices. External Website

Authors P His dark materials / Philip Pullman. ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience Mothering Sunday (book) Graham Swift 2016 From the Booker Award winner: a luminous, profoundly moving work of fiction that begins with an afternoon tryst in 1924 between a servant girl and the young man of the neighboring house, but then opens to reveal the whole life of a remarkable woman. Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild, orphaned at birth, has worked as a maid at one English country estate since she was sixteen. And for almost all of those years she has been the secret lover to Paul Sheringham, the scion of the estate next door. On an unseasonably warm March afternoon, Jane and Paul will make love for the last time--though not, as Jane believes, because Paul is about to be married--and the events of the day will alter Jane's life forever. As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane--about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers--deepens with every beautifully wrought moment. External Website