Into the light

In The Mistress's Daughter, the novelist AM Homes, who was adopted as a baby, explores her relationship with her biological parents. "Her various meetings with Ellen and Norman are described in terms that make them sound like uncomfortable dreams," wrote Christopher Tayler in the Sunday Telegraph, while Miranda Seymour in the Sunday Times noted that "Ellen becomes most real after her death, when Homes repossesses her mother and fictionalises her". "This memoir is a gamble for Homes," said Viv Groskop in the New Statesman. "We should be grateful for her honesty: the result is a fearless brand of writing that is utterly compelling." "The Mistress's Daughter turns truth into a fable for the 21st century in much the same way as Nabokov's Lolita did for the 20th or Baudelaire's vision of being haunted by his double for the 19th," declared Hilary Spurling in the Observer. "It thrives on the tangled roots of fact and fiction."