The Ginger Child

A raw and heart-wrenching literary memoir about a queer couple's attempt to adopt a child. But would you take a ginger child? A social worker asks Patrick Flanery as he and his husband embark on their four-year odyssey of trying to adopt. This curious question comes to haunt the journey, which Flanery recounts with startling candour as he explores what it means to make a family as a queer couple, to be an outsider in a foreign country, to grapple with the inheritance of intergenerational loss, and to discover that the emotions we feel are sometimes as mysterious to ourselves as to others. Reviews For TheGinger Child: 'It is shocking, and consoling, in its honesty.' - Emma Brockes 'this is a book to be savoured' - Jackie Kay 'A rare, brilliant and essential exploration of adoption'- John D'Agata This uniquely powerful book moves deftly between heartbreaking memoir and illuminating meditation on parenting, adoption and queerness in contemporary culture, stopping along the way to consider recent science fiction film, camp horror television, fiction and visual art. At the end, which could also be the beginning of a new journey, Flanery asks whether we might all imagine ourselves as ginger children-fragile, sensitive, more easily hurt than we think possible, but with the hope that we are also survivors, with greater powers of resilience than we know.

Patrick Flanery is the author of the critically acclaimed novels I Am No One, Fallen Land and Absolution, which was shortlisted for the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. Born and raised in the US, he has lived in Britain since 2001. His work has appeared in Granta, Zoetrope: All Story, the Guardian, The Spectator, Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.