A novel of breathless literary suspense in which a mother's love for her daughter is tested by an act of domestic violence.

After the incident, Jo's impulse is to run away, to escape the small town where her marriage has dissolved and a love affair has apparently soured, and to return with her children to the house in London where she herself grew up. But it is Jo's teenage daughter who actually runs away, jumping from the London-bound train between stations, turning up briefly at the home of her oblivious father and his unsympathetic new wife, then continuing to run, on her own and increasingly at risk.

Why Jo doesn't give chase, why she doesn't seek help or even report her missing daughter, becomes gradually clear in a novel distinguished equally by its startling perceptiveness and its consummate artistry, a novel that challenges our notion of what a good mother is and does.

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