First Thoughts: The Girl in the Red Coat

THE story of a child going missing will resonate with many people from newspaper headlines if not actually from the direct experience of living with someone who has disappeared.

Kate Hamer’s debut page-turner is a very persuasive imagining of this experience and it very much captures that sense of living with someone who has disappeared rather than living without them.

Here, for instance, where the mother is bereft at the absence of her daughter and hundreds of days into the shattering drama she goes looking for the shoes she had promised to buy. There is that terrible sense of a mother continuing to live with her daughter with her every breath but without her by her side.