Name: The Girl in the Red Coat
ISBN: 9780571316441

K. Hamer

Eight-year-old Carmel has always been different - sensitive, distracted, with an heartstopping tendency to go missing. Her mother Beth, newly single, worries about her daughter's strangeness, especially as she is trying to rebuild a life for the two of them on her own. When she takes Carmel for an outing to a local festival, her worst fear is realised: Carmel disappears into the crowd. Unable to accept the possibility that her daughter might be gone for good, Beth embarks on a mission to find her. Meanwhile, Carmel begins an extraordinary and terrifying journey of her own. But do the real clues to Carmel's disappearance lie in the otherworldly qualities her mother had only begun to guess at?

The Girl in the Red Coat

Kate Hamer

She is the missing girl. But she doesn't know she's lost.Carmel Wakeford becomes separated from her mother at a local children's festival, and is found by a man who claims to be her estranged grandfather. He tells her that her mother has had an accident and that she is to live with him for now. As days become weeks with her new family, 8-year-old Carmel realises that this man believes she has a special gift...While her mother desperately tries to find her, Carmel embarks on an extraordinary journey, one that will make her question who she is - and who she might become.

* Costa Book Award for First Novel finalist * Dagger Award finalist "Kate Hamer's gripping debut novel immediately recalls the explosion of similarly titled books and movies, from Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, to The Girl on the Train to Gone Girl ... "--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Keeps the reader turning pages at a frantic clip... What's most powerful here is not whodunnit, or even why, but how this mother and daughter bear their separation, and the stories they tell themselves to help endure it." --Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You) "Compulsively readable...Beautifully written and unpredictable, I had to stop myself racing to the end to find out what happened." --Rosamund Lupton (Sister) "Both gripping and sensitive -- beautifully written, it is a compulsive, aching story full of loss and redemption." --Lisa Ballantyne (The Guilty One) "Hamer's dark tale of the lost and found is nearly impossible to put down." --Booklist Newly single mom Beth has one constant, gnawing worry: that her dreamy eight-year-old daughter, Carmel, who has a tendency to wander off, will one day go missing. And then one day, it happens: On a Saturday morning thick with fog, Beth takes Carmel to a local outdoor festival, they get separated in the crowd, and Carmel is gone. Shattered, Beth sets herself on the grim and lonely mission to find her daughter, keeping on relentlessly even as the authorities tell her that Carmel may be gone for good. Carmel, meanwhile, is on a strange and harrowing journey of her own--to a totally unexpected place that requires her to live by her wits, while trying desperately to keep in her head, at all times, a vision of her mother ... Alternating between Beth's story and Carmel's, and written in gripping prose that won't let go, The Girl in the Red Coat--like Emma Donoghue's Room and M. L. Stedman's The Light Between Oceans--is an utterly immersive story that's impossible to put down . . . and impossible to forget.

Kayla Higginbotham

Melanie Knight

Denise

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa First Novel Award Eight-year-old Carmel has always been different - sensitive, distracted, with an heartstopping tendency to go missing. Her mother Beth, newly single, worries about her daughter's strangeness, especially as she is trying to rebuild a life for the two of them on her own. When she takes Carmel for an outing to a local festival, her worst fear is realised: Carmel disappears into the crowd. Unable to accept the possibility that her daughter might be gone for good, Beth embarks on a mission to find her. Meanwhile, Carmel begins an extraordinary and terrifying journey of her own. But do the real clues to Carmel's disappearance lie in the otherworldly qualities her mother had only begun to guess at?

The Girl in the Red Coat

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