Daughter - Softcover

Shemilt, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405916516 ISBN 13: 9781405916516

Publisher: Penguin, 2014

Synopsis

*A Sunday Times top five bestseller and Richard & Judy Autumn Book Club pick*

When a teenage girl goes missing her mother discovers she doesn't know her daughter as well as she thought in Jane Shemilt's haunting debut novel, Daughter.

THE NIGHT OF THE DISAPPEARANCE
She used to tell me everything.
They have a picture. It'll help.
But it doesn't show the way her hair shines so brightly it looks like sheets of gold.
She has a tiny mole, just beneath her left eyebrow.
She smells very faintly of lemons.
She bites her nails.
She never cries.
She loves autumn, I wanted to tell them. She collects leaves, like a child does. She is just a child.
FIND HER.

ONE YEAR LATER
Naomi is still missing. Jenny is a mother on the brink of obsession. The Malcolm family is in pieces.
Is finding the truth about Naomi the only way to put them back together?
Or is the truth the thing that will finally tear them apart?

Daughter by Jane Shemilt is an emotional and compelling story about how well you really know those you love most.

While working as a GP, Jane Shemilt completed a post graduate diploma in Creative Writing at Bristol university and went on to study for the M.A in Creative writing at Bath Spa, gaining both with distinction. She was shortlisted for the Janklow and Nesbitt award and the Lucy Cavendish fiction prize for Daughter, which is her first novel.
She and her husband, a Professor of Neurosurgery, have five children and live in Bristol.

Praise for Daughter
'We absolutely loved this book. It's about a GP and her family and the sudden horror that devastates their lives when their 16-year-old daughter disappears one night. It's difficult to believe that this accomplished book is a debut' Judy Finnigan, Richard and Judy book club

'Ostensibly a suspense novel about the disappearance of a teenage girl, this taut and thought-provoking debut novel explores a working mother's guilt, something all-too familiar to many of us' Woman & Home

'Complex and baffling. Jane Shemilt builds layer upon layer of tension in a novel you won't be able to put down' Tess Gerritsen

'Gripping to the last page!' My Weekly

'Thrilling' Sunday Express

'Clever' Sun

'Taut and thought-provoking' Sunday Mirror

'Utterly gripping. A tautly coiled spring of suspicion and suspense which builds to a devastating ending' Mail On Sunday

'A wonderful plot, full of tantalising reasons to read on, and of course with a killer twist at the end. What impressed me most was (. . .) the impossibility of truly knowing those closest to us, the pressures of parenthood - in particular working motherhood, and the terrible loss at the heart of all parenting: they grow up and away' Christopher Wakling, author of What I Did

About this title

Review:

"Shemilt injects a great deal of suspense into her narrative in both time frames, even as her fluid prose eloquently captures a mother's grief and painful journey to self-awareness."--Booklist

"Jenny is a strong believable character...[her] journey is a memorable one."--Publishers Weekly

It s every mother s nightmare: the disappearance of a child. But in "The Daughter," what appears to be a simple abduction soon turns into something far more complex and baffling. Jane Shemilt builds layer upon layer of tension in a thriller you won t be able to put down. --Tess Gerritsen, bestselling author of "Last to Die""

Shemilt injects a great deal of suspense into her narrative in both time frames, even as her fluid prose eloquently captures a mother s grief and painful journey to self-awareness. --Booklist"

Jenny is a strong believable character [her] journey is a memorable one. --Publishers Weekly"

"It's every mother's nightmare: the disappearance of a child. But in The Daughter, what appears to be a simple abduction soon turns into something far more complex and baffling. Jane Shemilt builds layer upon layer of tension in a thriller you won't be able to put down."--Tess Gerritsen, bestselling author of Last to Die

-It's every mother's nightmare: the disappearance of a child. But in The Daughter, what appears to be a simple abduction soon turns into something far more complex and baffling. Jane Shemilt builds layer upon layer of tension in a thriller you won't be able to put down.---Tess Gerritsen, bestselling author of Last to Die

-Shemilt injects a great deal of suspense into her narrative in both time frames, even as her fluid prose eloquently captures a mother's grief and painful journey to self-awareness.---Booklist

-Jenny is a strong believable character...[her] journey is a memorable one.---Publishers Weekly

From the Back Cover:

Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon.

But when her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Naomi, doesn't come home after her school play, Jenny's seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished, and her family is broken.

As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios--kidnapping, murder--seem less plausible. The trail has gone cold. Yet, for a desperate Jenny, the search has barely begun. More than a year after her daughter's disappearance, she's still digging for answers--and what she finds disturbs her. Everyone she's trusted, everyone she thought she knew, has been keeping secrets, especially Naomi. Piecing together the traces her daughter left behind, Jenny discovers a very different Naomi from the girl she thought she'd raised.

Jenny knows she'll never be able to find Naomi unless she uncovers the whole truth about her daughter--a twisting, painful journey into the past that will lead to an almost unthinkable revelation. . . .

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1405916516
• ISBN 13: 9781405916516
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368