Choosing which books to buy as gifts at Christmas can be tricky and with the silly season well underway, we’re here to recommend some great books for the special people in your life. Next, we’re recommending The Nowhere Child.
On a break between teaching photography classes in Melbourne, Kim Leamy is approached by a stranger investigating the disappearance of a little girl called Sammy from her Kentucky home twenty-eight years earlier. He believes Kim is that girl.
At first, she brushes it off, but when Kim scratches the surface of her family history in Australia, questions arise that aren’t easily answered. To find the truth, she must travel to Sammy’s home of Manson, Kentucky, and into a dark past. As the mystery of the disappearance unravels and the town’s secrets are revealed, this superb novel builds towards an electrifying climax.
The Nowhere Child, Christian White’s thriller debut, took the world by storm this year – and for good reason. The novel is compulsively readable – the trademark characteristic of a fantastic thriller. If you have any readers in your life who love a page-turner that sends shivers up their spine and has them hanging onto every word, then you will certainly want to introduce them to The Nowhere Child this Christmas.
Not just an astounding thriller, this novel is a testament to Australia’s great diversity and scope of literature – particularly debut fiction. If you happen to know a reader who enjoys the thrill of discovering a new author who is already making an international name for himself, then The Nowhere Child is perfect.
Like-wise, for readers who like to feel scared, this novel is a total, hair-raising treat and although not a book for the faint-hearted, be assured there is no gore. But of twists and turns, ratcheting tension and a gob-smacking (but credible) finale that will likely stay with you forever, there is aplenty.
Christian White is an Australian author and screenwriter whose projects include feature film Relic. An early draft of his first novel, The Nowhere Child, won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and rights were quickly sold into fifteen countries. Born and raised on the Mornington Peninsula, Christian had an eclectic range of ‘day jobs’ before he was able to write full time, including food-cart driver on a golf course and video editor for an adult film company. He now spends his days writing from home in Melbourne, where he lives with his wife, filmmaker Summer DeRoche, and their adopted greyhound, Issy. He has a passion for true crime podcasts, Stephen King and anything to do with Bigfoot.
Read our review of The Nowhere Child here, or purchase a copy here.