Overview

Rosa Flores relives her long struggle for a child on her way to the delivery room in a Los Angeles hospital, having already decided to sacrifice her own life for her unborn baby. Inspired by a true story, this is the journey of a Mexican American woman born and raised in Los Angeles, a teacher and artist in her thirties who dreams of building a loving family. After a painful breakup that affects both her personal life and her work as a kindergarten teacher, Rosa meets Luke Anderson, a lawyer, at a family gathering. Their connection is immediate, and they build a happy marriage that lasts more than a decade. But their dream of becoming parents slowly turns into a relentless battle. Despite consulting leading doctors, enduring repeated miscarriages, isolation, and eventual financial strain, they are told that Rosa cannot have children. Denial, anger, depression, and grief begin to erode the stability of their marriage and shake the foundations of their faith. As time runs out, Rosa and Luke take one final risk and place their hopes in an old friend who is now a fertility doctor. Against the odds, in-vitro fertilization succeeds, and Rosa becomes pregnant with a baby boy. Yet hardship does not ease. Their parents fall ill, and Rosa's deeply religious mother attempts suicide, further destabilising their sense of belief and purpose. On the way to the delivery room, Rosa is prepared to give her life to save her child, while her doctor faces a devastating professional dilemma over who can be saved. Rosa survives the birth, but the baby is discovered to have a potentially severe heart condition and is placed on life support. Almost simultaneously, Rosa is diagnosed with leukemia and is unable to see or hold her son. Powerless in the face of both their lives hanging in the balance, Luke is shattered. Forced to confront mortality, marriage, and motherhood in their rawest form, Rosa begins to reassess her relationship with herself and with life. She chooses to fight, agreeing to aggressive chemotherapy in the hope of survival. As mother and child face their most fragile moment, the question remains: will they survive this final battle, and will life allow them the happiness they have fought so hard to claim?

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9781806056491

Table of Contents

Reviews

A profoundly human novel about love as daily courage. Our Own Miracle is a story about building meaning inside uncertainty. With lyrical restraint and emotional intelligence, Niki Lambropoulos traces Rosa's journey from silence and survival into chosen love and hard-won family. This book understands that miracles are not divine interruptions, but acts of endurance, care, and presence. A brave, intimate portrait of motherhood without sentimentality. This novel dares to enter spaces many stories avoid: fertility clinics, hospital corridors, moral exhaustion, and quiet despair. Yet it never loses its tenderness. Lambropoulos writes with cinematic clarity and novelistic depth, allowing grief and hope to coexist without forcing resolution. Rosa's voice lingers long after the final page. A rare story where love is not romanticized, it is practiced. Our Own Miracle reframes love as labor, faith as action, and family as something assembled through choice. The book's emotional honesty is matched by its cultural specificity, weaving Mexican American heritage, Catholic imagery, and contemporary Los Angeles into a narrative that feels both intimate and universal. A masterclass in emotional storytelling. Lambropoulos brings her background in screenwriting and classical storytelling into a novel that moves with precision and restraint. Every scene earns its weight. Every silence matters. Rosa's final realization, love is a practice, is one of the most quietly radical statements in recent fiction. A novel that speaks to anyone who has waited, hoped, and kept going. This book will resonate deeply with readers who have experienced infertility, illness, caregiving, or long-term emotional struggle, but it is not limited to those. It is about how people stay human under pressure, and how families are forged in moments that never make headlines. Unflinching, compassionate, unforgettable. Our Own Miracle refuses easy catharsis. Instead, it offers something rarer: recognition. Lambropoulos writes grief without spectacle and joy without triumphalism. By the final chapter, the reader understands that the miracle is not the child alone, it is the life assembled around him.

Author Information

Niki Lambropoulos, Ph.D., is a writer and screenwriter, born in Ancient Olympia, Greece. She studied Creative Writing, the History of Contemporary Art, and Screenwriting at the University of the Arts London, Sotheby's Institute of Art, the University of East Anglia, and with Robert McKee in Los Angeles. She holds a BA and Diploma in Education, an MA in Digital Humanities from the Institute of Education, University College London (UCL), and a PhD in Digital Humanities from London South Bank University. She is the editor of two books and the author of six books and monographs, three of which focus on creative storytelling, and has also published widely in her research field. Niki writes short stories, novels, stage plays, and screenplays, and her work has earned international awards and recognition.

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