Dunedin Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute

Book: Relative Strangers – Athenaeum Book Club 2019

By Pip Murdoch

September 20, 2019

Athenaeum Book Club selection 2019

Pip Murdoch has written a searingly honest memoir about growing up in the nineteen sixties and what it was like to give up a child for adoption,  in the face of limited choices and moral disapproval of unmarried mothers.

The search for her son, years after his birth, is a poignant, often heart-breaking account that reads like a page turning detective story.

Anyone who has been affected by the adoption circle, and there are many of us in New Zealand, will find this a compulsive read, and be touched by its compassionate approach to every aspect of the process and the people involved, whether it be the adoptee, birth parents, or adoptive parents, and the legacy of the practice.  Above all, it is an extraordinary and vivid testament to an era.

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