[Many thanks to Bocas Lit Fest for bringing this item to our attention.] Our most enthusiastic congratulations to Claire Adam, whose novel, Love Forms (Hogarth and Faber & Faber, 2025) is the winner of the 2026 Encore Award, granted by The Society of Authors. [Also see our previous post New Book: Love Forms-A Novel.]
Description: For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something is missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.
More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought. It’s an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps—from Trinidad to Venezuela and then to London—and to question not only that fateful decision she’d made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.
Love Forms is a powerfully moving story of a woman in search of herself—a novel that rings with heartfelt empathy through the passages of a mother’s life, depicting the enduring bonds of love, family, and home.
Claire Adam was born and raised in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Her debut novel, Golden Child, was published by Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP for Hogarth. It was listed as one of the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” and was awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and the McKitterick Prize. She studied physics at Brown University and later received an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Adam lives in London.
For more information, see https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665340/love-forms-by-claire-adam/ and https://clairemcalpine.com/2025/10/19/love-forms-by-claire-adam-trinidad-tobago/
Read a review of the novel at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/12/love-forms-by-claire-adam-review-the-power-of-a-mothers-loss and an interview with the author at https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/claire-adam-interview
[Many thanks to Bocas Lit Fest for bringing this item to our attention.] Our most enthusiastic congratulations to Claire Adam, whose novel, Love Forms (Hogarth and Faber & Faber, 2025) is the winner of the 2026 Encore Award, granted by The Society of Authors. [Also see our previous post New Book: Love Forms-A Novel.] Description:
