04-07-2025
Love Forms by Claire Adam: A novel of cumulative force
Love Forms
Author
:
Claire Adam
ISBN-13
:
978-0571339549
Publisher
:
Faber & Faber
Guideline Price
:
£16.99
Love Forms is a novel about what we bury and the surprising ways it resurfaces. The first scene takes place in 1980. Sixteen-year-old Dawn Bishop, heavily pregnant, boards a boat from her home in Trinidad to a convent in Venezuela. There, she will give birth and give up the child for adoption. Her white, upper-class family has handled the logistics and made a pact: when she comes back, all of this will be forgotten.
But the body remembers. So does the mind, even when it tries not to. The novel, narrated by an older Dawn (divorced, living in England, mother to two grown sons), doesn't follow a straight line. It moves by echo and examination, circling back through memories that are sometimes pivotal, sometimes seemingly incidental. Yet it never drifts. Each new memory has a weight; it shifts the balance of the narrative, reconfiguring the relationship between the events that precede it. This isn't a confession but a reassembly, a story that evolves as the narrator tries to sort through it in her mind.
[
Claire Adam on St Patrick's Day in Trinidad: 'We'd come back from school to find all the Irish ladies boozed up and laughing their heads off'
]
The catalyst arrives in the form of a message from a stranger claiming to be Dawn's lost daughter. After years of searching through online forums and being met with false leads, this may finally be the connection she has been seeking. But this is not a novel about reunion. It's about what happens when realisation comes too late.
Dawn's voice is the novel's anchor: wise, perceptive, and eminently likable. She is a well-drawn portrait of the average middle-aged mother, who has seen far more than she lets on, and carries her experience lightly. ''Girl,' I said. 'It's not easy!' I meant it in the way only Trinidadians would understand, the marvelling at how strange the world was, how incomprehensible.' Her sturdiness, laced with exasperated humour, prevents the subject from becoming unbearably leaden.
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Love Forms is a novel of cumulative force. There's no catharsis or revelation, just the quiet pressure of the past pushing against the present. As the title suggests, it's an examination of two intertwined meanings: the varied forms love takes, and the complex, often strange process by which love itself forms within us. Claire Adam brings a refreshing seriousness and sincerity to these mysteries.
