Emma Sutton

Emma Sutton writes about adoption, family life and the not-inconsiderable gap between parenting books and what actually happens in your living room.

She is the author of And Then There Were Four, the story of how she and her husband became parents to two siblings, and And Trauma Made Five, which picks up their story a few years later, when they discover that they have also welcomed an invisible and rather disruptive fifth member into the family: trauma.

Her writing combines honesty, humour and the occasional parenting catastrophe with an exploration of what happens when traditional parenting stops working. Drawing on lived experience, therapeutic parenting ideas and a great deal of trial and error, she writes about the messy business of learning to understand the story beneath a child’s behaviour.

Emma lives in Yorkshire with her husband, children and an assortment of animals. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found drinking fruit tea (or gin), buying books she definitely has room for, or enthusiastically starting another project.