The Thaw: A Novel of Embryo Adoption

About this book:

When Elena and Mark walk into the fertility clinic after five years of failed treatments, they aren't expecting a binder of strangers' lives to become their path to parenthood. But embryo adoption isn't science fiction—it's a frozen archive of other people's hope, stored at minus 196 degrees in liquid nitrogen tanks outside Atlanta. Twenty-four profiles. Three choices. One transfer. And no guarantee the microscopic life inside those straws will survive the thaw, let alone become the child they've ached for.

As they turn pages dense with medical histories, personality ratings, and raw, redacted letters from couples who couldn't bear to destroy what they created, the clinical process cracks open into something far more intimate. A landscape architect and an editor find themselves measuring soil they didn't till, planting seeds with someone else's DNA, wondering if love requires a genetic blueprint—or if it simply requires showing up, again and again, for a heartbeat that began in another woman's body.

*The Thaw* is a luminous, unflinching novel about the architecture of family when biology fails you. It maps the fragile terrain between grief and grace, between the stranger's child you carry and the child you become for each other. For anyone who has waited, wondered, or built a home from something broken—this is the story of what happens when the ice finally breaks.