Garden Hopping : A Memoir of Adoption

A poignant memoir from a prize-winning author

Garden Hopping: when you leap through people's gardens in the dead of night. Only a few boys did it. The air rushed through you. You were like a phantom. You could have been anyone.

It is an apt metaphor for the adoption business.

As a teenager Jonathan Rendall used to go garden hopping. He had been adopted in the 1960s, when it was easy. People could just pick out the children they wanted, down to the colour of their hair. But what of the children themselves? And what happens when years later they trace their real parents? A harrowing and often shocking journey into the dark night of identity.

Praise for Garden Hopping:

‘Arrestingly incisive: confessional without being self-indulgent; angry but not too self-pitying; tempered with some deliciously bitter humour. A sharp, concise and engaging read.’

New Statesman