The Daughter: A Novel

Jane Shemilt

Mar 2015 · Harper Collins

About this ebook

In the tradition of Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Ruth Rendell, this compelling and clever psychological thriller spins the harrowing tale of a mother’s obsessive search for her missing daughter.

Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon.

But when her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Naomi, doesn’t come home after her school play, Jenny’s seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished, and her family is broken.

As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios—kidnapping, murder—seem less plausible. The trail has gone cold. Yet for a desperate Jenny, the search has barely begun. More than a year after her daughter’s disappearance, she’s still digging for answers—and what she finds disturbs her. Everyone she’s trusted, everyone she thought she knew, has been keeping secrets, especially Naomi. Piecing together the traces her daughter left behind, Jenny discovers a very different Naomi from the girl she thought she’d raised. 

Ratings and reviews

I finished it in 2 days. Very, very well written. There's a part where our narrator imagines her daughter having sex, which is weird (do parents do that?) but in all, a very good book.

A random choice read that I found very compelling! Jenny's character was complex and believable, and l enjoyed the development of her social conscience, around how privilege had dulled her perspective on her life and her family. Especially when she sees her self/life through the lens of Michael's eyes, and recognizes the blatant discrimination just under his surface. The clever false leads as to the perpetrator we're absolutely devious and hooked me right through to the end!

Slow...... Very slow...... Ending was a failed attempt to recover this monotone book.

About the author

While working full time as a physician, Jane Shemilt received an M.A. in creative writing. She was shortlisted for the Janklow and Nesbit award and the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize for The Daughter, her first novel. She and her husband, a professor of neurosurgery, have five children and live in Bristol, England.