Love Forms by Claudia Adam

This was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize but it did not make the short list. I read it before I know what the short list would consist of, but in reality that wouldn't have changed my mind--I often prefer some things on the long list that don't make that cut to those that do. This is a novel steeped in regret. Dawn is the youngest child of a well-known Trinidadian fruit juice dynasty. They are rich and mixed race, but Dawn can pass for white. At 16, after a brief encounter with a tourist at carnival in Trinidad, she finds herself pregnant. Petrified of the stigma, her otherwise caring parents make an agreement (of sorts--Dawn really doesn't have much of a say in it even though she is almost an adult) never to speak of it again, dispatching her, under cover of darkness, on a terrifying and chillingly evoked boat trip to Venezuela. There she spends four months with nuns who deliver her baby – a girl she never sees again – then is returned to Trinidad to resume her schooling as if nothing has happened. Something did happen, though, and The bulk of the novel is Dawn being preoccupied with finding the girl she gave up forty plus years before and all the heart ache of false hopes and dreams that never quite come to fruition. It is a good reflection on the ripple effect of these traumas, and why we really shouldn't encourage teenagers to have their babies and give them up for a mythical better life.