Kate Hamer Libri

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa First Novel Award Eight-year-old Carmel has always been different - sensitive, distracted, with an heartstopping tendency to go missing. Her mother Beth, newly single, worries about her daughter's strangeness, especially as she is trying to rebuild a life for the two of them on her own. When she takes Carmel for an outing to a local festival, her worst fear is realised: Carmel disappears into the crowd. Unable to accept the possibility that her daughter might be gone for good, 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?

Beth is desperate to return to normality. After a years-long ordeal, her daughter is finally home and safe. But Carmel has questions she can't ignore about the cult that kidnapped her, and about the preacher who gave her another girl's name.Found, she must survive a miracle.Digging into her past, Carmel uncovers secrets which suggest that she wasn't the only lost girl - and which puts her in danger all over again. While her mother struggles to salvage the safety they've only just found, Carmel tries to come to terms with who she has become. One question, a mystery at the heart of her disappearance as a child, haunts her:What happened to the other lost girls?

Phoebe stands on Pultenay Bridge trying to cover her face with her hair so she won't be recognized. Her tights are gashed from toe to thigh. She has lost a shoe. People keep looking. Was it five, or ten minutes later she heard the commotion? Phoebe ran down the road until she saw. Mangled metal. Blood ran down the walls. Phoebe believes this was of her making. She thought murder, and murder happened. She had told them her thoughts weren't just thoughts and now she must live with the consequences. Phoebe won't miss any more signs. Who will be next to suffer? Phoebe directs her ire at her mother, scissors and knives all covertly pointing in her direction, but there are others to whom she is inexorably bound, her best friends Grace and Orla, and then there's Mr Jonasson. Any of them might find themselves caught in the crossfire. For Phoebe is many things, but she is not in control.

Unique and beautiful . . . a haunting, mesmerising read. Rosamund Lupton, author of 'Sister'

They tie our lives together. The only way to learn them is by getting them wrong. But just because they're not written down doesn't mean you won't be judged by them. Welcome to the anthology of stories where hidden forces are at play. Welcome to The Book of Unwritten Rules... would you have known them? The authors met on the Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course in 2011. This is their first short-story collection.