Olga Boselli, a young Italian woman who immigrated to London with her parents at the turn of the century, dies during childbirth. Her son, Gian-Luca, is raised by his grandparents, but his grandmother, a hard woman with a nose for business, resents him—and God—for taking the life of her daughter.

As Gian-Luca comes of age, he struggles to find an identity and meaning in his life. His grandmother, the mother figure in his life, is cold; he grows up in an Italian ghetto, and so feels simultaneously apart from his English peers, but neither entirely fitting in with the culture of the Italian immigrants around him.

He turns to poetry to help fill that void, and then later, to work as a waiter at an elegant restaurant. But even after he marries a loving woman who treats him like a king, he still feels unmoored from the society around him—and then World War I begins, sending him spiraling into a repulsion for food and the life he’s found himself in.

Adam’s Breed was a critically acclaimed bestseller in its day, earning both the James Tait Black Memorial Fiction Prize and the Prix Femina—Vie Heureuse . Its plot has been compared favorably to Siddhartha , another bildungsroman focusing on the search for religious meaning.