This book explores what it is like to be involved in contemporary open adoption, characterised by varying forms of contact with birth relatives, from an adoptive parent point of view.

The author s fine-grained interpretative phenomenological analysis of adopters accounts reveals the complexity of kinship for those whose most significant relationships are made, unmade and permanently altered through adoption. MacDonald distinctively connects adoption to wider sociological theories of relatedness and personal life, and focuses on domestic non-kin adoption of children from state care,...