The Nowhere Child

DEBUT In this stunning first novel, White weaves stories within stories while keeping the thrilling mystery alive. Kim Leamy is a photography professor at a community college in Australia. She leads a quiet life alone, with reading as her primary source of entertainment. That changes when she's approached in the school cafeteria by a man with an American accent named Stuart, who shows her a photograph of a long-ago abducted child named Sammy Went. Perplexed, Kim insists she knows nothing about the kidnapping, but Stuart tells her, "I think you are Sammy Went." As she comes to terms with the possibilities and agrees to travel back to the States with Stuart, her world turns completely upside down. The small southern town of Manson, AL, is also home to the Light Within, a fundamentalist Christian church whose members, the Light Withiners, handle poisonous snakes and speak in tongues. Some of those members are also Sammy Went's family, and Kim is about to get more enlightened than she ever dreamed.