For the mother of adopted daughters from China, this forensically researched study is both disturbing and destabilising.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China’s Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins
BARBARA DEMICK
(GRANTA, 336 PP, £20)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £18 • TEL 020 7799 4064

This is an emotionally charged account of how the process of encouraging overseas parents to adopt baby girls from China became, over the years, corrupted. It is brilliantly researched but tough reading for an adoptive parent like me, and it leaves many unanswered questions.

When we embarked on the long process of adopting from China (which I wrote about in The Tablet, 1 September 2001), we were responding, like thousands of others, to the consequences of China’s disastrous One Child Policy, enacted in 1979.

For centuries, girls had been abandoned on hillsides because of the age-old preference for boys, but now, with family size restricted by law and brutally enforced through compulsory abortions and sterilisations, there was an ever-shrinking chance of a daughter, if she survived birth, being able to stay with her parents.

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