The Daughter

February 16, 2015
British author Shemiltâs sensitive if sometimes painful first novel focuses on the disintegration of the Malcolm family of Bristol, England, in the wake of a tragedy: husband Ted, a neurosurgeon; wife Jenny, a family doctor and amateur painter; their 17-year-old twins, Ed and Theo; and their 15-year-old daughter, Naomi. Naomi lands the plum role of Maria in her schoolâs production of West Side Story, but after a performance she disappears without a trace. A year later, Jenny is living alone in Dorset, having discovered that everything she thought about her family was incomplete or wrong. Jenny is a strong and believable character, and the blinkers that keep her from seeing her husband and children clearly grow as insidiously as cataracts. The secrets hidden from Jenny are common ones, but her absorption in her work, her art, and the daily routines of family life keeps her from seeing the problems. Not all the characters are as well drawn as Jenny, and Naomi remains too much of a mystery, but Jennyâs journey is a memorable one. Agent: Eve White, Eve White Literary Agency (U.K.).

February 1, 2015
Jenny is a busy family doctor in Bristol, England, with three teenagers and a loving husband, who is a neurosurgeon. She feels entirely blessed until her 15-year-old daughter, Naomi, fails to return home after a school play. As the weeks tick by, Jenny's perfect life starts to crumble, and she realizes that she didn't really know her daughter, who had become a different person than the one Jenny so lovingly raised. Other secrets soon emerge involving her twin sons and her husband, and she is suddenly confronted with the fact that she had been absent from her own life, too preoccupied with her job to notice the clues that had been there all along. First-novelist Shemilt sets up two time frames: one deals with the disappearance and immediate traumatic aftermath; the other takes place a year later, when Jenny is living alone in a cottage in Dorset, still trying to process what went wrong. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)