Imagined Child

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 Joburg. To the dwellers of Nagelaten, Odette appears to be escaping a painful break-up in a place she knows no-one – and won’t have to share her secrets. When Odette begins seeing the local engineer, Adriaan, also an outcast in this small town, secrets begin to surface around the murder of Adriaan’s wife. Odette’s world begins to unravel, when her ‘troubled’ daughter, Mandy, is suspected of killing the baby she was au pairing in the UK and soon comes to live with Odette, who has a secret of her own. It isn’t until Mandy befriends a strange man named Wolfie that Odette finally begins to question the mysteries of the small town.Odette is forced to face her mistakes of the past and the truth of a murder long since buried with the dead. The Imagined Child is a carefully plotted ‘whodunit’ that combines Jo-Anne’s trademark lyrical style with tight suspense and 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 most recent novel, My Brother’s Book, was published by Picador Africa. Jo-Anne’s first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken, was originally published by Headline Review in the UK. When it first appeared, it topped the South African bestseller list in its first week and remained there for 15 weeks.