Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Kim Leamy is living a life of quiet desperation in suburban Melbourne, then a seemingly chance meeting with a stranger turns her life upside down. Everything she thought she knew about herself is, he says, false. Her real name is Sammy Went and she was abducted as a child from a small town in Kentucky thirty years earlier.
Christian White's debut novel is a psychological thriller that switches between the present day and the early nineties.
He delves deep into the subject of identity and the white-lies, families tell about who they are. The fault line between these white-lies provides much of the tension in the novel, not least because at some level we all identify with such well-meaning half-truths that create as many problems as they avoid.
White also writes well about the intrinsic strangeness of backwoods America, a place where old enmities run deep, and fundamentalists prove their faith by handling snakes in church. In the process, this debut author paints a melancholy picture of narrow lives, in a huge country.
This one of the most impressive first novels I have read in recent memory. It sets the bar a good few notches higher for other writers of psychological thrillers and sets White up as a name to watch for on our bookshelves.
