The Girls We Sent Away

Girls in your condition don't get to have their say.

It’s the 1960s in North Carolina, and Lorraine Delford has it all—an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and an idyllic home complete with a white picket fence. Yet every time she looks through her father’s telescope, she dreams of leaving it all behind to go to space. It’s ambitious, but Lorraine has always been exceptional.

But when this darling girl-next-door gets pregnant, she’s forced to learn firsthand the realities that keep women grounded. To hide their daughter’s secret shame, the Delfords send Lorraine to a maternity home for wayward girls. But this is no safe haven—it’s a house with dark secrets and suffocating rules. And as Lorraine begins to piece together a new vision for her life, she must decide if she has the power to fight for the future she wants or if she must submit to the rules of a society she once admired.

Powerful and affecting, The Girls We Sent Away is a timely novel set during the intersection of the Baby Scoop Era and Space Race that explores autonomy, belonging, and a quest for agency when the illusions of life-as-you-know-it fall away.

“Readers will be entranced as author Meagan Church steadily peels away the veneer of the era, revealing the dark underbelly of a secretive and unforgiving society.”—Tracey Enerson Wood, international bestselling author of The Engineer’s Wife and The War Nurse