Hamer, Kate

""[Evokes] both Jeanette Winterson and Ian McEwan. an elegiac and uplifting novel about the indissoluble bonds between mothers and daughters, and a reminder of how the imagination can set you free." -- The Guardian On Ruby's thirteenth birthday, a wishshe didn't even know she had suddenly comes true: the couple who raised her aren't her parents at all. Her real mother and father are out there somewhere, and Ruby becomes determined to find them. Venturing into the forest with nothing but a suitcase and the company of her only true friend--the imaginary Shadow Boy--Ruby discovers a group of siblings who live alone in the woods. The children take her in, and while they offer the closest Ruby's ever had to a family, Ruby begins to suspect that they mightneed her even more than she needs them. And it's not always clear what's real and what's not--or who's trying to help her and who might be a threat. Told from shifting timelines, and the alternating perspectives of teenage Ruby; her mother, Anna; and even the Shadow Boy, The Doll Funeral is a dazzling follow-up to Kate Hamer's breakout debut, The Girl in the Red Coat, and a gripping, exquisitely mysterious novel about the connections that remain after a family has been broken apart"--.

"Eight-year-old Carmel has always been different--sensitive, distracted, with an heart-stopping tendency to go missing. Her mother Beth, newly single, worries about her daughter's strangeness, especially as she is trying to build a new life for the two of them. When she takes Carmel to a local festival, her worst fear is realized: Carmel disappears into the crowd. Unable to accept the possibility that her daughter might be gone forever, Beth embarks on a mission to find her. Meanwhile, Carmel begins an extraordinary and terrifying journey of her own. But do the real clues to Carmel's disappearance lie in the otherworldly qualities her mother had only begun to guess at?"--Publisher.