Being Lara - Lola Jaye (2012)

It's Lara's 30th birthday and as she makes her wish a Nigerian lady comes to the door and creates chaos - she is Lara's biological mother. The novel then takes three directions. The first involves Lara's story - her experiences growing up including when she first told she was an "alien". The second is of Lara's adoptive mother Patricia, who started off like any poor white girl in a neighbourhood where nobody really went anywhere. But Pat always knew she would be a somebody and that somebody turns out to be Trish Smith - an 80s pop star. Trish soon meets Barry and seeks to start a family which leads them to Lara, a little girl abandoned at a Nigerian orphanage. The third story thread is Yomi's - Lara (or Omalara's) birth mother. It has taken 30 years of birthday wishes for Lara but when she discovers the truth of her past - will it be the moment she had waited for her entire life or will it lead to more disappointment? Being Lara is for all those girls who make birthday wishes every year and yearn for them to come true. (PP)

Lola Jaye's latest novel, Being Lara, is about a 30-year-old woman finally meeting her biological mother. The summary says: "What other explanation could there be? With her dark complexion and kinky hair, so unlike her fair-skinned parents, Lara knew she was different. At eight she finally learned the word "adopted". Twenty-two years later, a stranger arrives as she blows out the candles on her 30th birthday cake - a woman in a blue-and-black head tie who also claims the title "Lara's mother". Lara, always in control, now finds her life slipping free of the stranglehold she's had on it. Unexpected, dangerously unfamiliar emotions are turning Lara's life upside down, pulling her between Nigeria and London, forcing her to confront the truth about her past. But if she's brave enough to embrace the lives of her two mothers, she may discover once and for all what it truly means to be Lara."

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