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6 March 2023: Reading. Writing. Thoughts on Kei Miller, John Donne and Elizabeth Gaskell…..Read More
Blogs:
11 May 2022 for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize Reflections
4 May 2022 for Adoption Arena It was as though I needed to grab adoption by the scruff of the neck and shake it…
A Child in the Middle
‘A remarkable investigation of what family truly means.’ – James Hawes, Sunday Times best-selling author
“Catherine Chanter is a woman who acutely and astutely understands the world of fostering and adoption. She writes with extraordinary sensitivity about both sides of adoption” British Journal of Social Work 2022 P. 356
Order your copy now from Linen Press Bookshop
Introducing Catherine Chanter
Catherine Chanter is a writer whose haunting first novel The Well, published by Canongate in 2015, was a Richard & Judy book club pick, long-listed for a CWA John Creasey (new blood) Dagger and sold in 12 countries. Her second novel The Half Sister followed three years later. She is also a prize winning poet and short story writer and has had work broadcast by BBC Radio 4.
A Child in the Middle is a narrative non-fiction work which brings together her search for her birth family and her professional experience in the arena of care and adoption, gained from decades working with vulnerable young people and their families.
A Child in the Middle
‘Need. Crave. Fear. Lovely monosyllabic verbs which perch like hungry gulls on top of the iceberg floating in a cold sea.’
This brings together the personal and the professional in a rich and insightful exploration of adoption. For anyone touched by, or interested in adoption, this speaks to you from a base of wisdom experience and honesty.
The Well
When Ruth Ardingly and her family first drive up from London in their grime-encrusted car and view The Well, they are enchanted by a jewel of a place, a farm that appears to offer everything the family are searching for.
An opportunity for Ruth. An escape for Mark. A home for their grandson Lucien.
The Half Sister
When she was sixteen, Diana left her unhappy family and set out to make a new life.
Twenty five years later, she has arrived. Recently married to Edmund, there are just the two of them living at Wynhope, his family’s historic country home, both happy for the past to be locked away and for the future to be free from responsibility.