This gripping tale of the abduction of a young girl paints a fascinatingly complex picture of pain and loss
How does a person cope with the pain of losing those they most love? This is a fate befalling characters in Kate Hamer’s gripping debut novel which explores lives turned into “a terrible broken puzzle”. Loss percolates through the pages of the pacy story which joins a spate of novels with titular girls ( including Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train), which have at their heart somebody who has vanished.
The novel explores both the power and perils of the stories we tell one another and how they can lead us either closer to or further from the truth: it’s during a visit to a storytelling festival that eight-year-old Carmel is abducted by a man who spins an elaborate yarn about who he is and who she is. Carmel clings to remnants of her real identity to stop them melting from memory: as they travel through America, she writes down her name whenever she can – in salt from little packets on diner tables, on the walls of restrooms, in the dust on the sides of trucks.
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