BOOK REVIEW | It is not immediately obvious from the title but this is a novel about adoption in middle age, which has more than a ring of truth to it because the author, Sunita Sue Leng, a Malaysian living in Singapore, became a mother through that path herself.

Even if we are not fathers or mothers through adoption, don’t we know a whole lot of people who have become so through adoption? I found it a fascinating subject for a novel.

The book, a finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2025 in Singapore, is not a memoir but an interesting amalgam of personal experience and imagination to produce a highly readable, realistic fictional account of a couple living in Singapore who decided to adopt at middle age.

The tone is breezy and humorous as it...