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Fiction featuring Care Experience Hand Me Down World Lloyd Jones 2010 NZ writer Lloyd Jones' 2010 novel, Hand Me Down World, is the compelling story of a young African woman searching for the child stolen from her. When the story opens, the woman, Ines, is working in a hotel in Tunisian. She has a child by one of the hotel guests and that child is then taken from her (under the pretext she consented to the child being adopted). The woman migrates ‘illegally’ to Europe in search of her son. With help along the way, she journeys through Italy and Switzerland and eventually arrives in Berlin, where her son, Daniel, lives. More help is provided in Berlin by Bertrand, a beggar-poet; a blind man called Ralf (who worked as an academic before he became blind and was in an orphanage during WWII) for whom Ines works as a carer; and another man who lives with Ines and Ralf to help out with Ralf. Ines does get to spend time with her son, Daniel, but there is no happy ending, only the possibility of one in the future. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Who We Are Who Cares Scotland ​ A look at the representation of Care Experienced People in fictional and news media over time. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Political Suicide Michael Palmer 2014 When high-society doctor Gary McHugh believes he will be arrested for murder, he turns to old friend Dr Lou Welcome for help. Lou Welcome's best friend and AA sponsor is a care experienced character. Cap Duncan is a former professional boxer and now runs a gym, training Lou and Lou's 13 year old daughter, Emily. Cap doesn't feature heavily in the story but is there in pivotal moments. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles By Malik Al Nasir, as told to Ed Thomas Rashida Yosufzai 2021 While 10 orphans were able to be evacuated out of Afghanistan, dozens of others were left behind. Ten Afghan orphans who were smuggled through Afghanistan on buses and cars through the mountainous terrain of the war-torn country arrived in Australia on Friday. They were removed from orphanages run by Australian charity Mahboba’s Promise in remote regions of Afghanistan as the Taliban took over the country. External Website

Children's Fiction The Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling 1894 The tales in the book (as well as those in The Second Jungle Book, which followed in 1895 and includes five further stories about Mowgli) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to teach moral lessons. A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling's own childhood. Mowgli was lost by his parents as a baby in the Indian jungle during a tiger attack, he is adopted by the Wolf Mother, Raksha and Father Wolf, who call him Mowgli (frog) because of his lack of fur and his refusal to sit still. Shere Khan the tiger demands that they give him the baby but the wolves refuse. Mowgli grows up with the pack, hunting with his brother wolves. In the pack, Mowgli learns he is able to stare down any wolf, and his unique ability to remove the painful thorns from the paws of his brothers is deeply appreciated as well. External Website

Children's Fiction Homecoming: Volume 1 Cynthia Voight 2012 “It’s still true.” That’s the first thing James Tillerman says to his older sister, Dicey, every morning. It’s still true that their mother has abandoned the four Tillermans in a mall parking lot somewhere in the middle of Connecticut. It’s still true that they have to find their own way to Great-aunt Cilla’s house in Bridgeport. It’s still true that they need to spend as little as possible on food and seek shelter anywhere that is out of view of the authorities. It’s still true that the only way they can hope to all stay together is to just keep moving forward. Deep down, Dicey hopes they can find someone to trust, someone who will take them in and love them. But she’s afraid it’s just too much to hope for.... External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Fragile Sarah Hilary 2021 Fragile (2021) by Sarah Hilary features characters from a children's home. Nell Ballard is now homeless, running from her past and carrying a secret she longs to set down. In Starling Villas, she becomes servant to an eccentric recluse. Robin Wilder lives by an exacting set of rules, expecting the same from Nell, who fears his retribution should she let standards slip. Just as she begins to find her balance in the house, Robin’s former wife sweeps in. Carolyn Wilder has no intention of allowing Nell to become comfortable in her new home. But who is underestimating whom? And who truly holds the power in Starling Villas? As events overtake the household, old wounds reopen and the past rushes in to exact its own terrible price. Fragile is a modern Gothic psychological thriller with a contemporary twist on the classic novel Rebecca External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Choose Me Kay Langdale 2013 Billy is only nine years old. But he's already learned that when your mum dies, you get your own social worker. He's also learned that once you are ten, the odds of finding a family to adopt you don't look so good. That's the part he wasn't supposed to overhear. Miriam Riley is up against a deadline to give Billy the 'forever family' that every child deserves. Determined to cut through red tape, she finds three very different couples who might fit the bill, though prospective parents come with issues of their own. Through Billy's watchful eyes, the summer unfolds. What does he really need? Will anyone choose him? External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors Cane Warriors Alex Wheatle ​ Moa is fourteen. The only life he has ever known is toiling on the Frontier sugarcane plantation for endless hot days, fearing the vicious whips of the overseers. Then one night he learns of an uprising, led by the charismatic Tacky. Moa is to be a cane warrior, and fight for the freedom of all the enslaved people in the nearby plantations. But before they can escape, Moa and his friend Keverton, a CEP character, must face their first great task: to kill their overseer, Misser Donaldson. Based on the historical Tacky’s War in Jamaica, 1760. External Website

Comics, Comic books & Graphic Novels Valda Valda 1968 Abandoned as a baby, Valda was found and raised by a Gypsy woman named Dorcas. Valda was created in 1968 for the Girl's comic Mandy, she was designed to be a female equivalent to the popular character William Wilson. Her first appearance was in the 56th issue of the comic. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Every Good Deed and Other Stories Dorothy Whipple 2011 Every Good Deed was originally published in 1944 as a novella and is now included in a collection of short stories published in 2011 by Persephone Books. Two spinster sisters adopt a child from a local orphanage. Susan and Emily Topham are shy and caring. Their cook is a little more worldly-wise, but just barely. Gwen, the orphan steals, she talks back, she lies. She abuses the sisters and eventually runs away. A case of the sisters believing that if an orphan was cared about, she would in turn care but here nature trumps nurture which is disappointing as it feeds into the negative portrayal of care experience. To top it all, Gwen’s not even an orphan; her wily mother uses the situation to exact cash from the Topham sisters. One Good Turn starring Norman Wisdom, a very different story about a hapless handyman who finds his good intentions leading to disaster when he tries to raise money for an orphanage threatened with closure. The film was inspired by Whipple's novella. External Website

Behind the Scenes Louis Esson (Australian theatre) ​ ​ Australian playwright, poet, journalist and critic, Louis Esson (1878-1943) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He moved with his mother to Melbourne, Australia when he was 3. For most of his childhood in Melbourne, Louis lived with his aunts and uncles, only visiting his mother during school holidays. In the 1920s, Esson was a co-founder of the Pioneer Players, a theatre company dedicated to the performance of Australian plays. Although the Pioneer Players survived only 4 years, Louis Esson is widely regarded as the ‘father of Australian drama’. External Website

Children's Fiction Tell me again about the night i was born Jamie Lee Curtis 2000 Children's picture book based on Jamie Lee Curtis' experience of adopting. External Website

Children's Non-fiction Eleanor, Quiet No More Doreen Rappaport 2009 Eleanor Roosevelt was raised in kinship care. She lived in a privileged but stern Victorian household, with an affectionate but mostly absent father and a critical mother who made fun of her daughter's looks. Alone and lonely for much of her childhood, Eleanor found solace in books and in the life of her lively and independent mind. Her intellec External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience A Thousand Moons Sebastian Barry 2021 Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live… Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. External Website

Children's Fiction Saffy's Angel Hilary McKay 2003 The four Casson children, whose mother, Eve, is a fine-arts painter, have all been given the names of paint colors. Cadmium (Caddy), is the eldest; then Saffron (Saffy); Indigo, the only boy; and Rose, the youngest. When Saffy discovers quite by accident that she has been adopted, she is deeply upset, though the others assure her that it makes no difference at all. Saffy is the daughter of Eve's twin sister, who lived in Siena, Italy, and died in a car crash. Grandad brought Saffy, as a very small child, back from Siena. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience How to Measure a Cow Margaret Forster 2016 Tara Fraser has a secret. Desperate to escape herself and her past, she changes her name, packs up her London home and moves to a town in the North of England where she knows no one. But one of her new neighbours, Nancy, is intrigued by her. And as hard as Tara tries to distance herself, she starts to drop her guard. Tara is under no illusions about her own faults. She knows she has a temper and can lash out. Her foster parents had tried to give her all the love and attention she needed. But she had been a difficult child and a very problematic adolescent. Then a letter arrives. An old friend wants to meet up. Struggling to keep her old life at bay, Tara soon discovers the dangers of fighting the past. External Website

Cartoons Emily's Story: Haringey foster care guide ​ 2015 Commissioned by Haringey Council, this animation has been created to prepare and reassure young people going into foster care, explaining the process and people involved. Aspire (Haringey's Children in Care Council) were on hand as our expert consultants, steering Exposure in the right direction and ensuring the film was able to strike the right tone. The guide explores life in foster care, what a foster carer actually does, the role of adult professionals providing additional support, entitlements, education and preparing for the future. Emily’s Story will be made available to all looked-after young people in Haringey. While sensitive to the feelings of the intended audience and mindful of the need to get vital information across, the film was injected with humour, sound effects and music to help lighten the mood. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience A Second Life Dermot Bolger 2010 Following a car crash, for several seconds, Dublin photographer Sean Blake is clinically dead. He experiences the overwhelmingly powerful sensation of being drawn towards a blissful afterworld, to find his progress blocked by the haunting face of a man he only partially recognises. He plummets back to life into a world which, for him, has profoundly changed. The pieces of his life seem not to fit anymore as he struggles, deeply traumatized, to adjust to this gift of a second life. Yet this is not the first time that he has been given a second life. At the age of six weeks he was taken from his mother, when as a young girl in rural Ireland, she was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Beginning the quest for his own identity, and struggling against a wall of official silence and a complex sense of guilt, Sean determines to find his natural mother, while continuing to search for the face that has haunted him since the crash. This leads him on a strange and absorbing journey through his various pasts, into archives, memories, dreams and startling confessions. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors Luckenbooth Jenni Fagan 2021 Luckenbooth is historical fiction. Set in Edinburgh and across 9 decades, the story begins with Jessie Macrae leaving home, on an island in the North Sea, and arriving in Edinburgh where she becomes a surrogate for a shady character and his wife. Over the next nine decades, the novel tells the story of those who live in Luckenbooth Close. External Website