Approval is a powerful meditation on judgment, the adoption process, and fatherhood, told from a perspective rarely explored in fiction: a man’s response to a couple’s infertility.
Approval follows would-be parents David and Cici through a series of forays into the past as they go through the motions of applying to adopt a child. Their story builds a picture of hope, vulnerability and fear as David is put under intense and intrusive scrutiny during their battle against faceless bureaucracy. From family background and early experiences to adult relationships, he is forced to revisit uncomfortable – sometimes painful – episodes, in the hope of meeting the authority’s requirements.
Confronting a lonely, difficult and uncertain path to family life, and raising questions about how much intervention and judgement is necessary for the state to ascertain fitness to parent, Approval ultimately invites the reader to decide.
Arvustused
John Rutter's Approval is many things at once. A powerful meditation on judgement. A transfixing fable of a Kafka-esque application process. A complex tragedy about fatherhood. But it's also a simple, affecting and beautifully wrought story of one couple's journey towards what they most desire a child and the cost of reaching out for one. A hugely promising debut. -- Rodge Glass "An authentic voice the issues it raises are very real and have contemporary resonance." -- Lancashire Evening Post
Muu info
A remarkable, brave and provocative debut on painful aspects of family life from a less explored perspective; explores uncomfortable questions of how far the state intrudes on private life, how judgement is made, and how we readers might measure up if submitted to these tests; winner of the 2020 NorthBound Book Award.
John D Rutter is a writer of literary and short fiction and an academic who teaches, researches, edits and writes primarily on the short story the subject of his PhD from Edge Hill University. His stories and articles have been published in a variety of anthologies and journals. Approval is his first novel. John lives in Lancashire with his wife, Lin.
