About this item
Simply told but deeply affecting, in the bestselling tradition of Alice McDermott and Tom Perrotta, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore - and gets away with it for twenty-one years.Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It's a secret she manages to keep for over two decades - from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends. When Lucy's now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to avoid prosecution. What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of motherhood. Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia's birth mother, and others intimately involved in the kidnapping. What Was Mine is a compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment.
About the Author
Helen's third novel The Latecomers will be published by Little, Brown on November 6, 2018. Told in interweaving timelines, this story spans an American century, bringing steam engines, top hats and suffragettes into brilliant collision with cell phones, 9/11 and ancestry apps. Helen's poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, literary journals and in anthologies, including SHORT, published in 2014 by Persea Books. Her first novel, Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue, published in 2013 by Gallery/Simon and Schuster, is an e-book featuring the first digital epilogue. Her bestselling novel What Was Mine, published in 2016, tells the tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby from a shopping cart and gets away with it until the baby turns 21. Helen is also the creator and editor of a poetry anthology, The Traveler's Vade Mecum, from Red Hen Press. Over 80 poets-- including Frank Bidart, David Lehman and Billy Collins-- wrote to telegram titles from an 1853 compendium that provides a glimpse into habits and social aspects of nineteenth-century America. Helen lives in New York City and Lakeville, Connecticut where she is on the board of a haven for book lovers:
