THE IMAGINED CHILD

Richards has an acute sense of place, in its small town and big city guises, and a wonderful ear for South African idiom. My Brother's Book is her most ambitious work to date. Moving subtly between past and present, it casts a searing light on the way we reveal and conceal our truths in stories.' – Ivan Vladislavic ‘Jo-Anne Richards has the writer's eye, that natural ability to sniff out the telling detail and the right word. She is a delight to savour – one of the freshest voices to emerge from South African literature in years.' – Peter Godwin Odette is a script writer for a popular TV soap opera. When she moves to the small Free State town of Nagelaten she hopes to leave her problems – of family, fraught relationships and experiences of crime – behind in Johannesburg, but she soon discovers that life is not that simple. From Odette's ‘troubled' daughter, Mandy, to dealing with a small town's mysteries and cover ups, The Imagined Child is a carefully plotted ‘whodunit' that will keep you guessing until the last page. JO-ANNE RICHARDS is a South African novelist and journalist, whose work has been published internationally. She teaches creative writing through Allaboutwriting and lectures at Wits University in Johannesburg. Her previous novels include the best-selling The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1996), Touching the Lighthouse (1997), Sad at the Edges (2003) and My Brother's Book (2008).