‘Moving and emotionally raw, Shapiro’s memoir opens out from a painful reassessment of her life to grapple with the ethics of reproductive medicine in the 1960s.’ – Scottish Herald ‘A timely exploration of the profound social consequences of today’s burgeoning artificial insemination industry’ – Metro ‘Those who like to insist that blood is always thicker than water should read Inheritance, and let their own hearts slowly and gently expand.’ – The Observer ‘In prose as clear as a bell, Inheritance addresses the impact of nature versus nurture … it is superb storytelling.’ – TLS And she knows how to tell a story… Fascinating.’ – Sunday Times ‘Shapiro writes with poetic precision in prose that sometimes sings. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in – a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

It is a book about secrets – secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. Inheritance is a genetic detective story a memoir that reads like a thriller. With only a handful of figures on a webpage, Shapiro set out to discover the truth about herself and her history. Everything she had believed about her identity was a lie. In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father.

‘All my life I had known there was a secret.

Inheritance novel by dani shapiro