Shadow Baby

Description

A powerful, moving story about motherhood, abandonment and guilt which casts a shadow across generations. Born in Carlisle in 1887, brought up in a children's home and by reluctant relatives, Evie, with her wild hair and unassuming ways, seems a quiet, undemanding child. Shona, born almost seventy years later, is headstrong and striking. She grows up in comfort and security in Scotland, the only child of doting parents. But there are, as she discovers, unanswered questions about her past. The two girls have only one thing in common- both were abandoned as babies by their mothers. Different times, different circumstances, but these two girls grow up sharing the same obsession. Each sets out to stalk and then haunt her natural mother. Both mothers dread disclosure; both daughters seek emotional compensation and, ultimately, revenge.

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster was the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want? , Keeping the World Away, Over and The Unknown Bridesmaid. She also wrote bestselling memoirs - Hidden Lives, Precious Lives and, most recently, My Life in Houses - and biographies. She was married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lived in London and the Lake District. She died in February 2016, just before her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, was published.

A brilliant exploration of choice and consequence * Mail on Sunday * Enthralling... readers will plunge happily into the kind of family story for which Margaret Foster is celebrated and which she executes so well -- Anita Brooker * Spectator * An unfailingly intelligent novel, full of lucid observation of a phenomenon, mother-love, too often seen through a gilded haze of false feeling and wishful thinking... Forster is a fine storyteller * Sunday Times * Intricate, romantic and full of suspense * Observer * An excellently funny, moving novel... a text for our times -- Auberon Waugh * Independent *