Makaeli Lovechild Hunt, a successful fashion designer, struggles with her own spirituality and bi-racial identity until a family emergency forces her to face her tumultuous past. In seven life-altering days, she discovers what forgiveness really means. Amidst crises painful enough to make her turn her back on God forever, she learns what it means to be God's lovechild.

'What was she? Not a child, for she was seventeen, and taller than Kitty: not a girl, for she floated like a feather, and flew into trees like a bird; not a spirit - she was human to touch. But to-night she was all made of mischief and magic, remote form him, and yet calling him to here . . .' At thirty-two, her mother dead, Agatha Bodenham finds herself quite alone. She summons back to life the only friend she ever knew, Clarissa, the dream companion of her childhood. At first Clarissa comes by night, and then by day, gathering substance in the warmth of Agatha's obsessive love until it seems that others too can see her. See, but not touch, for Agatha has made her love child for herself alone. No man may approach her elfin creation of perfect beauty. If he does, the love which summoned her can spirit her away . . . The Love Child (1927) was Edith Olivier's first novel, acknowledged as a minor masterpiece: a perfectly imagined fable and a moving and perceptive portrayal of unfulfilled maternal love.

When Allegra Huston was four years old, her mother was killed in a car crash. Soon afterward, she was introduced to an intimidating man wreathed in cigar smoke -- the legendary film director John Huston -- with the words, "This is your father." So began an extraordinary odyssey: from the magical Huston estate in Ireland to the Long Island suburbs to a hidden paradise in Mexico -- and, at the side of her older sister, Anjelica, into the hilltop retreats of Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal, and Marlon Brando. Allegra's is the penetrating gaze of an outsider never quite sure if she belongs in this rarefied world and of a motherless child trying to make sense of her famous, fragmented family. Then, at the age of twelve, Allegra's precarious sense of self was shattered when she was, once more, introduced to her father -- her real one this time, the British aristocrat and historian John Julius Norwich. At the heart of Love Child is Allegra's search through the unreliable certainties of memory for the widely adored mother she never knew -- the ghost who shadowed her childhood and left her in a web of awkward and unwelcome truths. With clear-eyed tenderness, Allegra tells of how she forged bonds with both her famous fathers, transforming her mother's difficult legacy into a hard-won blessing. Beautifully written and forensically honest, Love Child is a seductive insight into one of Hollywood's great dynasties and the story of how, in a family that defied convention, one woman found her balance on the shifting sands of conflicting loyalties.

Brilliantly evoking the changing attitudes of the time, The Love Child is a novel about love, family, separation, despair, and hope, full of tenderness and deep feeling. A young mother’s sacrifice. A child’s desperate search for the truth... London, 1917 When nineteen-year-old Alice Copeman becomes pregnant, she is forced by her father and stepmother to give up the baby. She simply cannot be allowed to bring shame upon her family. But all Alice can think about is the small, kitten-like child she gave away, and she mourns the father, a young soldier, so beloved, who will never have the chance to know his daughter. Edith and Philip Burns, a childless couple, yearn for a child of their own. When they secretly adopt a baby girl, Irene, their life together must surely be complete. Irene grows up knowing that she is different from other children, but no one will tell her the full truth. Putting hopes of marriage and children behind her, Alice embarks upon a pioneering medical career, striving to make her way in a male-dominated world. Meanwhile, Irene struggles to define her own life, eventually leaving her Suffolk home to find work in London. As two extraordinary stories intertwine across two decades, will secrets long-buried at last come to light?

A girl comes of age in the radical 1960s in this “beautifully written” novel by the groundbreaking author of The Women’s Room (Kate Mosse). It’s 1968 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jess Leighton, the daughter of a temperamental painter and a proto-feminist Harvard professor, is struggling to make sense of her world amid racial tensions, Vietnam War protests, anti-government rage, her own burgeoning sexuality, and bad relationships. With more options than her mother’s generation, but no role model for creating the life she desires, Jess experiments with sex and psychedelic drugs as she searches for happiness on her own terms. In the midst of joining and fleeing a commune, growing organic vegetables, and operating a sustainable restaurant, Jess grapples with the legacy of her mother’s generation while building a future for herself, and for the postmodern woman. “French’s meticulous and affecting tale of the forging of one woman’s conscience encompasses thoughtful portraits of ‘love children,’ from peace activists to members of unconventional families, and a forthright critique of the counterculture that puts today’s wars, struggles for equality, and environmental troubles into sharp perspective” (Booklist).

From Simon & Schuster, The Love Child is Catherine Cookson's novel about womanhood in 19th century English countryside. As Anna Martell grows into womanhood in the nineteenth-century English countryside, she is determined to overcome the legacy of her birth--as one of six illegitimate children--a goal aided by the wealthy Timothy Barrington

National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection of poems articulates the Black American history into a new language of "docu-poetry."