'This is the Crittendon Home for Unwed Mothers. We believe your birth mother is trying to find you...'

Having escaped the madness of her adoptive family (mother Louise committing suicide at the seventh attempt, father Sheldon finding solace in an ever-growing porn collection) American-born Sandra Newman was living in the punk rock squalor of eighties London. She had made a new home in the cheerful Bohemian demi-monde of dreamers, drunks, and anarchists. When the call came, she was living in a squat, taking milk in coffee to make it a meal, surviving variously by temping, scamming, and turning tricks. The daylight world, where people have careers and families, seemed very far away.

Sandra's second chance at parents led her to opulent mansions in Hollywood, a hidden city of astronauts in the Soviet Union, and success as a writer. Her new life promises 'an improbable, abracadabra joy - what angels feel, or the children of happy families feel.' Laced with a streak of surreal humour and told with disarming honesty, Sandra Newman's memoir is an arresting tale of loss, belonging and rescue.