Rynn was born with a hole in her heart--literally. Although it was fixed long ago, she still feels an emptiness there when she wonders about her birth family. As her relationship with her adoptive mother fractures, Rynn finally decides she needs to know more about the rest of her family. Her search starts with a name, the only thing she has from her birth mother, and she quickly learns that she has a younger sister living in foster care in a nearby...

Follows the experiences of a young orphan raised in a World War II-era French convent, where she longs for her real mother and suffers at the hands of a remorseless abbess before eventually joining the French resistance.

"Aimee Pokwatka's novel Self-Portrait with Nothing is "fraught and deeply moving...the work of a genuinely exciting new talent." (Booker Prize winner, George Saunders). If a picture paints a thousand worlds... Abandoned as an infant on the local veterinarian's front porch, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two loving mothers, and now at thirty-six is married to the stable, supportive Ike. She's never told anyone that at fifteen she discovered the identity...