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It's a parent's worst nightmare: a missing child.
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 outdor 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.
Costa Book Award for First Novel finalist
Dagger Award finalist
"Starred Review. Hamer's dark tale of the lost and found is nearly impossible to put down and will spark much discussion." - Booklist
"Starred Review. "[A] spectacular debut … Telling the story in two remarkable voices, with Beth's chapters unfurling in past tense and Carmel's in present tense, the author weaves a page-turning narrative. The trajectories of the novel's two leads - through despair, hope, and redemption - are believable and nuanced, resulting in a morally complex, haunting read." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Reading this novel is a test of how fast you can turn pages. Hamer, a Rhys Davies Short Story Prize winner, is a natural storyteller who writes with such a sense of drama, compulsion, and sympathy that most readers will devour this work in one or two sittings." - Library Journal
"Exquisite prose surrounding a mother and daughter torn apart, but the book could have used more attention to less detail." - Kirkus
"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, author of 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, author of Sister
"Both gripping and sensitive - beautifully written, it is a compulsive, aching story full of loss and redemption." - Lisa Ballantyne, author of The Guilty One
This information about The Girl in the Red Coat was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kate Hamer is a winner of the Rhys Davies Short Story Prize. Girl in the Red Coat is her first novel. It is shortlisted for the Costa Book Award for First Novel and a finalist for The Dagger Award. She lives in Cardiff, Wales with her husband and two children.
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