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Title: The Imagined Child

Author: Jo-Anne Richards

Narrator: Terry Lloyd-Roberts

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-07-16

Publisher: Audioshelf

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Odette is a scriptwriter 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 breakup 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 minute.

Critic Reviews:

"Jo-Anne's trenchant observation of human behaviour, always laced with humour, makes for an engrossing read." (Athol Fugard)

"The Imagined Child is an impeccably researched - and sometimes very funny - portrait of upheaval and recreation in the New South Africa." (Diane Awerbuck)

"A captivating and quietly confident tale of life in the new South Africa. Jo-Anne Richards has a deft touch with words and uses it to weave a personal story set in a nation still trying to settle after the dust." (Shubnum Khan)

Members Reviews:

A rich portrayal of a mother and her daughter

Jo-Anne Richards is a writer with a great insight into people. In this novel the relationship between a mother and her daughter is pivotal to everything else in her life.

Odette is an out-liner for a soap opera on South African television. She is divorced and has a teenager, Mandy, with some relatively minor genetic issues affecting her learning and social abilities. Nevertheless, Mandy has finished school and has taken a year to go to London as an au pair for a family with two young children. While outwardly supporting Many, Odette is on tenterhooks that something will go wrong and relieved to have the problem at some physical distance.

Odette takes her new freedom as an opportunity to change her life. She leaves Johannesburg and moves to a small town within driving distance and only goes to meetings in Johannesburg once a week. These include meetings with the soap opera team and weekly meetings with her psychologist. She also invests considerable money in a coffee shop in the town.

Odette is looking for a simpler life, but there she is disappointed. She is burgled almost immediately, and the town seems to have some dark secrets that no one wants to discuss. She meets a farmer, and they form a relationship, for which Odette thinks she might settle, but it is clear very early in the book that she will never truly be accepted by this closed Afrikaans community although outwardly they are welcoming.

Then the baby Mandy is looking after dies mysteriously and she returns to live with her mother while the police in London decide whether to charge her.