The Daughter

by Jane Shemilt

*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

• ISBN10: 0062370065
• ISBN13: 9780062370068
• Publish Date: 3 March 2015 (first published 28 August 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Collins
• Edition: Large type / large print edition
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 496
• Language: English

Reviews

[Leah]

I've literally just finished reading Daughter... and I'm confused. What kind of ending was that? Who writes a 400 page book to end it so ambiguously? Ugh. I'm not impressed, and a tad confused. What exactly happened the night Naomi disappeared? Despite that being the main question asked of the novel, we don't actually find out definitively.

I also must confess to not liking the present day narrative. It was a bit boring, and Jenny's guilt came way, way too late. Whilst I understand her need for giving her kids independence, the way they all acted toward her tells me it was more like negligence. She talked to her kids when it suited her, and as such her relationship with all three was rubbish, to the point where they had an attitude towards her, and ignored her, and didn't answer her questions.

I was just immensely disappointed with the novel. I never felt as if I needed to be on the edge of my seat, I didn't find the novel particularly thrilling, in all honesty, I found it a bit boring, and I skipped large parts of the novel, in a bid to find out answers that never really came. It was a shame, as many people have enjoyed the novel, but I wasn't one of them.