Cover of If You Lived Here

If You Lived Here

At forty-two, Shelley Marino desperately wants a child. Though she and her older husband, Martin, have tried during the course of their marriage, their only hope now is adoption. Martin, who has seen his share of heartbreak, can't reconcile what Shelley wants with what he knows about the world, and as the father of two grown children from a previous marriage, he is not sure he can bear the emotional challenge of fatherhood again. To love is to risk loss and Martin suddenly decides that is a gamble he can't afford to take.

Read more

The pain of great loss is something that Mai, a woman who emigrated from Vietnam more than twenty years ago, knows all too well. Though Mai has attained all of the accoutrements of the American dream—a healthy business, an SUV, a house of her own—she has not allowed herself to forget the family tragedy that forced her to leave Vietnam. She has distanced herself from her life and from everyone around her—until she meets Shelley. Their budding friendship forces Mai to make a decision that will put her face-to-face with the world she left behind so long ago. And in the course of the journey the two women must make together, Shelley, too, confronts choices that will reverberate for the rest of her life.

Lyrical and moving, If You Lived Heretakes the reader on a journey as well, from loss to love, and shows how new beginnings can heal old wounds.

Themes
adoption
Setting
2000s
Audience
adult
Length
medium · 336 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked If You Lived Here? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked If You Lived Here. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. B-Mother Shares adoption, fiction
  2. Elena Undone
  3. The Mothers Shares fiction, adoption, contemporary fiction
  4. Taken by the Wind Shares fiction

“People who read If You Lived Here tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Love At Last
  2. Buddha Baby
  3. The Callahan Brothers: Blue Bayou, River Road, Magnolia Moon
  4. Summer Evenings at the Seafront Hotel

“If you want more of the same, start with these.”

  1. Mamalita: An Adoption Memoir
  2. Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison
  3. One Kid at a Time
  4. My Family, A Symphony: A Memoir of Global Adoption

“If it was the adoption that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Adoption
  2. Being Lara
  3. Post-Adoption Blues
  4. Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Barren Bride
  2. Where I Lost Her
  3. Living Apart Together
  4. Texas Fury