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** [[Circle of Magic|Briar]]: Street rat whose mother was murdered when he was four.
** [[Circle of Magic|Evvy]]: Sold as a slave by her parents
* Taran of [[Lloyd Alexander]]'s ''[[The Chronicles of Prydain]]'' was raised on a farm by two old guys, neither of whom are in any way relatives. In ''Taran Wanderer'' he tries to find out who his parents were, and ends up losing interest. [[
** Achren was not really Eilonwy's aunt. In the fourth book, ''Taran Wanderer'', Taran doesn't find out what happened to his own parents but does find out about Eilonwy's mother {{spoiler|-- it was revealed that Achren kidnapped Eilonwy as a baby, and Princess Angharad died trying to get her back.}} Additionally, the book ''The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain'' reveals the identity of Eilonwy's father.
* Ayla, the heroine from Jean M Auel's ''[[
** Probably helped that she had loving foster parents (Creb and Iza) raising her.
* [[Enid Blyton]]'s characters have absurdly neglectful parents by modern standards, in particular the Famous Five who are supervised largely by their Uncle and Aunt... who allow them to spend most of their time unsupervised on a distant island.
* ''I Sing The Body Electric'' by [[Ray Bradbury]] is set in motion by [[Missing Mom|the death of the kids' mother]].
* Standard practice for [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]]'s Green Martians. The women do not know whether their eggs were selected for hatching, and couldn't identify the fathers. [[John Carter of Mars]] attributes much of their harshness to this; one Green Martian raised by her mother, and knowing her father, is far more generous and gentle than her fellows.
* Jim Butcher's [[The Dresden Files|Harry Dresden]] lost both his parents before adulthood... [[Missing Mom|His mother]] [[Death
** Malcolm Dresden's death is ''way'' beyond being suspicious. In the TV series, {{spoiler|it's revealed that he was murdered by Justin Morningway, Harry's maternal uncle, by means of a voodoo doll. Justin cursed Malcolm (who was in Florida) with a fatal heart attack so that Justin could gain custody and control of eleven-year-old Harry, who had come into his power very young.}} In ''Fool Moon'', {{spoiler|a [[Our Demons Are Different|demon]] tells Harry that both of his parents died unnatural deaths, which surprises Harry, who had thought that his father had died of an aneurysm when he, Harry, was six.}}
** As for Margaret Dresden... {{spoiler|in ''Blood Rites'', Harry's mother is later revealed to have died due to a curse by her former consort and [[Our Vampires Are Different|White Court vampire]] Lord Raith. As she is dying, Margaret curses Lord Raith so he cannot feed, condemning him to a slow death by starvation.}}
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** Kitai, the Marat ambassador, also has abandonment issues, but for more normal reasons: her mother died when she was young.
* In ''[[Ender's Game]]'' by [[Orson Scott Card]], the parents of the geniuses Peter, Valentine and Andrew seem [[Parental Obliviousness|oblivious]] to the extracurricular activities of the elder two, as they use internet anonymity to gain influence on world affairs as political pundits. Peter in particular feels nothing but contempt for them and their ignorance. In one of the sequels to ''Ender's Shadow,'' however, this is completely inverted when the parents reveal they knew all along -- but pretended not to so that their kids wouldn't be afraid to write what they needed to say. They none-too-gently chide Peter that he should have known his and his siblings' super-intelligence had to come from ''somewhere.''
* [[Roald Dahl]] likes this trope. ''[[The BFG|The Big Friendly Giant]]'' stars an orphan named Sophie, ''Danny the Champion of the World'' has no mother (although she is discussed extensively), James of ''[[James and
** Averted in ''[[Charlie and
* The royal children of Pamela Dean's ''Secret Country'' all have [[Missing Mom|Missing Moms]] and distant fathers -- which proves most convenient. As does the fact that their real world alter-egos' parents are all in Australia.
** They even bring this up; "there seems to be a shortage of mothers around here" or words to that effect.
* Jeremy Griswold's book ''Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America's Classic Children's Books'' (published in softcover as ''The Classic American Children's Story: Novels of the Golden Age'') explores how a large fraction of child-heroes in classic novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries are orphans, half-orphans, displaced from their homes, or have parental issues.
* Pretty much every [[Anthony Horowitz]] series uses it, including ''[[
* In Conn Iggulden's ''Emperor'' series, Brutus has a [[Disappeared Dad|dead father]] and a [[Missing Mom|mother who abandoned him]] in order to have a career as a higher class prositute. He later finds a father figure in Renius, however he seems to prefer Caesar to Brutus, even {{spoiler|dying to protect Caesar}}, which can be interpreted as one of the reasons why Brutus ended up turning on Caesar. After all, Caesar didn't need any further father figures, he already had his birth father and then his uncle Marius.
* Jack Kerouac's poem "Home I'll Never Be" (which was ''also'' turned into a song by [[Tom Waits]]) is about a man finding his [[Disappeared Dad]] just in time to see him die of pleurosy.
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** ''[[Heralds of Valdemar|By the Sword]]'': The protagonist is orphaned by an attack at the beginning of the story.
*** Slightly subverted here. Yes her widowed father dies, but she meets her maternal grandmother for the first time in years and later finds out she has an entire clan of horse nomads for cousins.
** ''Phoenix and Ashes'': Since this is a [[World War I]] version of "[[Cinderella (
** ''Serpent's Shadow'': A [[Twice Told]] version of "[[Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (
** ''[[Heralds of Valdemar|To Take a Thief]]'': Skif is an orphan who is technically a ward of his uncle as the story opens.
** The ''Vows and Honor'' duology have this trope as [[Backstory]] for both protagonists. The first short story, "Sword Sworn", opens with a bandit attack in which Tarma's clan is wiped out and she is left for dead. In the first book-length story, ''The Oathbound'', we learn that Kethry's brother used his [[Promotion to Parent]] on the death of their widowed father to sell her into an [[Arranged Marriage]]. She was rescued and put into a wizard's [[Boarding School]].
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* ''Last of the Breed'' by [[Louis L'Amour]].
* [[Anne McCaffrey]]'s ''[[Dragonriders of Pern]]'' has this with Lessa, whose entire blood line was killed by Fax about ten Turns before the start of ''Dragonflight''.
** Jaxom could also apply for this trope as well. His mother [[Death
** And also F'lar and F'nor, who lost their father in a duel at a very young age. Of course, since Weyr children are fostered anyway, this might not apply.
** Menolly's parents alternate between emotionally distant and abusive. Her father whips her back bloody with his belt. Her mother deliberately lets a wound heal half-crooked so that she has basic use of the hand but not enough to play an instrument. Small wonder that Menolly runs away to go live with the miniature dragons.
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** ''Steel Magic'': The three kids' parents are on a trip to Japan; the kids have been left with an uncle.
** ''Three Against the Witch World'': The Tregarth siblings' [[Missing Mom]] left in search of their [[Disappeared Dad]] when the kids were half-grown.
** ''The X Factor'': Diskan Fentress' mother suffered [[Death
** ''Year of the Unicorn'': Gillian doesn't remember her parents; she became a refugee at Norstead Abbey as a young child.
* ''[[
* ''Eragon'' by Christopher Paolini. But then, if ''[[Star Wars]]'' appears on any page, odds are good that ''[[The Inheritance Trilogy]]'' will, too.
* The ''[[Mortal Engines]]'' series by Phillip Reeve.
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** Will Parry. When we first meet him, he's forced to abandon his mentally ill mother who he's been taking care of from a young age to go on his quest. When he finally finds his [[Disappeared Dad]], {{spoiler|he's immediately killed.}}
* ''[[Harry Potter]]''.
** Although Rowling kills parents and parental figures with merry abandon throughout the series, she also throws us an inversion: In ''[[Harry Potter and
*** Rowling not only admits to purposely orphaning Harry right off the bat, ("Harry had to be an orphan -- so that he's a free agent, with no fear of letting down his parents, disappointing them....") but she even cites the Potters' brutal murder happening first thing in ''[[Harry Potter and
** [[Butt Monkey|Neville]] [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass|Longbottom's]] parents didn't die either, but as one character puts it, "Better dead than what happened to them..." as they were {{spoiler|tortured into permanent insanity by Death Eaters using the Cruciatus curse, and they don't recognise their son when he comes to visit}}. This is why he's raised by his domineering grandmother, who, on her first appearance, seems disappointed that Neville didn't turn out more like his dad.
** Sirius Black was disowned by his [[Evil Matriarch]] mother when he was sixteen after he got sick of her [[Fantastic Racism]]. He promptly moved in with his best friend James and stayed until he was legally an adult.
* Sol's parents from ''[[
* ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'' by [[Lemony Snicket]]. Heck, the poor Baudelaires lose or are let down by about one parental figure per book for most of the series.
* Somewhat obscure children's book ''The Divide'' has an interesting variation. Protagonist Felix is [[Trapped in Another World]], but we ''do'' see how his parents are affected by his mysterious disappearance. They ain't happy.
* Parents are not mentioned very much in ''[[The War Between The Pitiful Teachers And The Splendid Kids]]'', seeing as the characters are in a prison-like school for bad teachers and smartasses. The lone(?) exception is Big Alice Eyesore, who was so wild as an ''infant'' (her teeth came in early; they were all canines) that her ''child psychologist'' parents left her in a wild animal park where she was raised by hyenas. They came back for her when she was an adolescent, but after learning that child psychology doesn't work on hyenas they abandoned her for good.
* Bobby's entire family disappears in the first ''[[Pendragon]]'' book, and the only explanation given by Bobby's new father figure, Uncle Press, is that Bobby will see them again. The other Travelers with mentioned parents were raised by the generation of Travelers before them, who generally die somewhere in the series. An exception is Spader's mother, who disappears the same way Bobby's family did. Heck, {{spoiler|uncle Press}} kicks the bucket in ''The Lost City of Faar''. {{spoiler|However, he does come back in the last chapter of Raven Rise.}} Also in Raven Rise, {{spoiler|several of the Travelers, who Bobby thinks of as his brothers or family, die. And then come back at the end magically along with Press. Mark and Courtney are assumed dead, though they turn out to be alive in the final book.}}
* ''[[
** Tobias' foster parents, supposedly his aunt and uncle, also emotionally abandon him to the extent that he figures they won't bother to look for him when he {{spoiler|loses his humanity}}.
* The disappearance of Finn's parents is half the reason for the plot of the [[Finnegan Zwake]] books. (The other half is the murders that [[
* ''Nobody'' in the ''[[Fingerprints]]'' series has both parents. Anthony and Jesse are missing their fathers; Rae, Yana, Mandy, and Emma are missing their mothers, and Sam lives on his own.
* It's not that [[Star Wars Expanded Universe|the Solo kids]] are abandoned by their parents; it's just that it's very busy work, saving and/or running the galaxy, hence their [[Parental Substitute|nanny]], Winter Celchu, doing a lot of the work in actually raising them.
* In The Chronicles of [[Narnia]], the Pevensie childrens' parents rarely appear. Justified in that their father was drafted and their mother sent them to the countryside to escape the German bombing of London
* Many characters in [[
* In Megan Whalen Turner's ''[[The
** A more straight example is the magus of Sounis, who explains that his entire family died in an epidemic, and the queen of Attolia, whose mother died when she was young, considered of little importance most of her childhood, and whose father was perfectly happy to marry her off as a [[Vague Age|young girl]] to preserve peace in his troubled country.
* In [[John C. Wright]]'s ''[[Chronicles of Chaos
* In [[Dr. Seuss]]'s famous children's book ''Horton Hatches the Egg'', a bird named Mayzie gets Horton the elephant to sit on her egg while she takes a break... and then extends that break for months on end, without a care in the world. Eventually she shows up wanting the egg back, but then it hatches to reveal an "elephant-bird".
* Angela Sommer-Bodenburg wrote a book of scary short stories with an injured boy named Freddy as a [[Framing Device]]. All five stories touch on [[Parental Abandonment]]. ''Barbara'' doesn't like it if you infer that her own death was her mother's fault. ''Harry'' drained his family's blood. ''The Child Under the Cloak'' was looking for someone to be her mother. ''Wolfgang'' has a father and step-mother who treat him like a freak just because he eats raw meat, howls at the moon and won't clip his nails. In the story Freddy writes himself, the Kindergarten class gets sick of their self-centered parents ''And They All Went Over The Hill''.
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* In [[Lewis Carroll]]'s ''[[Sylvie and Bruno]]'', their mother is never mentioned, and their father has to travel.
* Burke, the [[Villain Protagonist]] [[Private Detective]] from the novels by [[Andrew Vachss]], was dumped on the state foster care system by his underage mother (assumed to be a prostitute), for which he holds a great deal of bitterness.
* In ''[[Gone (novel)]]'' , by Michael Grant, the ''entire cast'' is orphaned at the same time on the first page of the book, except possibly the ones with family living outside of the FAYZ.
* Appears a lot in [[
* Very, very common in the works of [[Diana Wynne Jones]]: in the ''[[Chrestomanci]]'' books, Cat and Gwendolyn's parents are dead, Christopher's tend to ignore him, Conrad's mother is too busy writing to pay attention, and half the children in ''Witch Week'' have had one or both parents executed (and those that haven't have been sent away to boarding school because they are 'problem children'). In the ''[[The Dalemark Quartet|Dalemark]]'' books, Tanaqui and her siblings are left to fend for themselves, as are the children in ''Cart and Cwidder''. Luke in ''[[Eight Days of Luke]]'' is brought up by distant relatives, Mig's father in ''[[Black Maria]]'' has {{spoiler|apparently}} been murdered, Polly's parents in ''[[Fire and Hemlock]]'' divorce and toss her around between them until her grandmother takes her in, Kathleen in ''[[Dogsbody]]'' is living with her aunt because her father is in prison and Hailey's parents in ''The Game'' are presumed dead. Maree and Nick in ''[[The Magids|Deep Secret]]'' are {{spoiler|half-siblings and children of the Emperor, but both are brought up away from him, as are all his children. Nick lives with his real mother, but she is killed at the end of the book, leaving him with his (thankfully not at all wicked) stepfather}}, and Abdullah in ''[[Castle in
* In ''[[The Edge (
* In the ''[[Wheel of Time]]'' series, Rand's mother died when he was very young, leaving his father to raise him on his own. {{spoiler|Of course, in reality neither Tam nor Kari are his parents; his father was an Aiel and his mother was daughter-heir to the throne of Andor before running away to become a Maiden of the Spear. She died on Dragonmount shortly after his birth (thus setting the entire series in motion) and his father went to the Blight to fight and die to the Shadow after hearing of her death.}}
* At the beginning of Andrey Lazarchuk's ''[[Tranquilium]]'', the main character's father is dead and his mother, whom he never even knew, is in an insane asylum, because she is insane.
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* In ''[[Kingdom Keepers]]'', Maybeck lives with his aunt Jelly. When Finn questions him on where his parents are, he only responds that they "aren't around," prompting Finn to drop the issue.
** The second book reveals that [[The Sixth Ranger|Amanda]] and [[Perky Goth|Jez]] live alone, having run away from their foster home.
* In [[Robert E. Howard]]'s [[Conan the Barbarian]] story "A Witch Shall Be Born", Salome survives abandonment only to be rejected by the man who raised her for being not sufficiently interested in [[Things Man Was Not Meant to Know]].
{{quote|
He said I was but an earthly sprite, knowing naught of the deeper gulfs of cosmic sorcery. Well, this world contains all I desire--power, and pomp, and glittering pageantry, handsome men and soft women for my paramours and my slaves.'' }}
* Inverted in the French [[Sci Fi]] novel ''[[Malevil]]''. Emmanuel abandons his parents and is adopted by his favorite uncle. He considers his mother a simpering complainer, his father too cowardly to stand up to her, and both incapable of straight-forward honesty, leading him to run away from home.
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* Taken to [[Beyond the Impossible]] levels with Rincewind in [[Discworld]]- his mother ran away ''before he was born!''
* In [[Jane Austen]]'s ''[[Persuasion]]'', it is casually mentioned that the reason that Captain Wentworth had stayed at his brother's and so originally met Anne was that his parents were dead
* In [[Gene Stratton Porter]]'s ''[[
* In [[Gene Stratton Porter]]'s ''Michael O'Halloran'', Mickey's father died of drink, and then his mother, with no cause given. Near the opening of the story, he meets a crippled girl named Peaches, whose granny died and so will be taken to the Home.
* Both Hagia and John go to fight in the Crusades in ''[[
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[[Category:Parental Abandonment]]
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