The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Kim Edwards, 2005
Historical fiction Contemporary fictionMystery, thriller & crimeLiterary fiction
A doctor makes one decision in a snowstorm, and two families spend decades living with it. A novel about secrets, parenthood, and the children we don't expect. Quietly lyrical domestic drama, tender and tense, with a steady pace and a persistent sense of dread beneath the family secrets.
Feels like tenderness, dread and serenity. About love, family and power.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy patient family sagas about parenthood, marriage, and secrets that stretch across decades. The story moves slowly through many years, and the clinical language about disability, including outdated terms, can be jarring.
Why read it
It offers a close look at how one choice ripples through two families, and at the tender, difficult work of raising a child you did not plan for.
A page from the book
A doctor's training tells him what he is seeing before his heart can catch up.
Creamy white vernix whorled in her delicate skin, and she was slippery with amniotic fluid and traces of blood. The blue eyes were cloudy, the hair jet black, but he barely noticed all of this. What he was looking at were the unmistakable features, the eyes turned up as if with laughter, the epicanthal fold across their lids, the flattened nose. A classic case, he remembered his professor saying as they examined a similar child, years ago. A mongoloid. Do you know what that means? And the doctor, dutiful, had recited the symptoms he’d memorized from the text: flaccid muscle tone, delayed growth and mental development, possible heart complications, early death. The professor had nodded, placing his stethoscope on the baby’s smooth bare chest. Poor kid. There’s nothing they can do except try to keep him clean. They ought to spare themselves and send him to a home. Kim Edwards.Kim Edwards's first novel became a word-of-mouth paperback hit; it spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is The Memory Keeper's Daughter for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy patient family sagas about parenthood, marriage, and secrets that stretch across decades. The story moves slowly through many years, and the clinical language about disability, including outdated terms, can be jarring.
- What is The Memory Keeper's Daughter like?
- Quietly lyrical domestic drama, tender and tense, with a steady pace and a persistent sense of dread beneath the family secrets. Feels like tenderness, dread and serenity. About love, family and power.
- What should I read after The Memory Keeper's Daughter?
- If you liked The Memory Keeper's Daughter, try Redeeming Love (Francine Rivers), The Pact (Jodi Picoult) and Beartown (Fredrik Backman).
A taste of the feed
The difference between being someone’s partner and someone’s god.
No, you won’t. And I won’t be enough for you, Amanda. I don’t want to be the center of your life. I want to be part of it. I want to be your husband, not your god. People can’t always be there for you, no matter how much they want to be. And that includes me.
Redeeming Love · Francine Rivers
The problem with wanting everything to stay exactly as it is.
He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn’t figure out how to get from point A to point B.
The Pact · Jodi Picoult
What it sounds like when someone could ruin you and chooses not to.
I could open a black hole that would swallow the beach. I could turn the sea dark as ink and kill everything inside of it. I could demolish the castle, brick by brick, from where we stand. I could take you back to Nightshade lands with me right now.” His voice was deep as dreams, dark as nightmares. “I could do all of those things.” His lips pressed against the top of her ear, for just a moment. “And I might—if I didn’t think you would hate me for it.
Lightlark · Alex Aster
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed