WHAT WAS MINE

Simply told but deeply affecting, in the bestselling tradition of Alice McDermott and Tom Perrotta, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore—and gets away with it for twenty-one years.

Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It’s a secret she manages to keep for over two decades—from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends.

When Lucy’s now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to avoid prosecution. What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of motherhood.

Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia’s birth mother, and others intimately involved in the kidnapping. What Was Mine is a compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment.

Helen Klein Ross’s fiction and poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, StoryQuarterly, and other journals and anthologies. She won the Iowa Review Award in poetry, Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition, was a finalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Like DeLillo and Ferris, she is a veteran of advertising and spent many years at global ad agencies in San Francisco and New York City. Helen created the award-winning ad blog AdBroad in 2007. Her fictional Twitter handle @BettyDraper has earned press coverage in Time and The Wall Street Journal, a Shorty Award for innovation, and 35,000+ followers.