Any Other Family

A rare, funny and poignant novel celebrating the beauty of OPEN ADOPTION and NON-TRADITIONAL FAMILIES.



They look just like any other family... but between the four children there are THREE sets of parents who committed to an open adoption of biological siblings, keeping the children connected after the death of their grandmother.

Tabitha the planner of the group, is insistent that everything happens just so. Quiet single mother Ginger resists the forced togetherness, and newest mother Elizabeth is still reeling from going directly from failed fertility treatments into adopting a newborn.

But when the three women receive a surprising call from their children’s birth mother, announcing she is pregnant again and wants them to help her find an adoptive family for this child too, the delicate bonds they are still struggling to form threaten to collapse. As tensions start to rise on their joint family holiday, the three women reckon with their own feelings about what it means to be a mother and what they owe each other as a family.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters returns with a striking and intimate new novel about three very different women facing an impossible question: what makes a family?

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'[A] full-bodied exploration of family ties, especially those made by choice' The New York Times Book Review

'Brown’s experience with adoption brings emotional depth to her chronicle of each woman’s anxieties' The Washington Post

'Brown has a sure hand in portraying the adoptive women; their smart, lively dialogue sparks as the characters try to define the boundaries of a family' Publishers' Weekly

'A prismatic story of family, adoption, and how the people we choose to keep close shape who we are' Kirkus

'Explores what it means to be a family, in all its messy complication' Christina Baker Kline

'Brown brings compassion and insight to exploring the hopes and vulnerability that make us first human, then family' Isabel Costello

'A beautifully written, elegantly assembled exploration of the joys and complications of family, any family, no matter what it looks like' Laurie Frankel

'I adored this story' Prima

'Smart, original, wholly satisfying' Elinor Lipman