Reckoning - Softcover

Tyrell, Patricia

2.88

67 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0297848925 ISBN 13: 9780297848929

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004

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The novel is set in contemporary America and is narrated by Cate, a teenage girl. Cate has been raised on the run by a homeless drifter called Les, who abducted her from a campsite thirteen years before. Over the years, out of a warped sense of responsibility, Les has occasionally telephoned Cate's mother, to update her on her child's progress. But as the novel opens he rings to tell the confused and grieving woman that he is finally bringing her daughter home. Cate has done something so terrible that Les has belatedly understood the moral consequences of his actions years before. But how will Cate cope with learning to love a mother she can't remember, and with learning to despise the man she has come to consider as her father? And how will her English mother square the memories of her three-year-old daughter with the hard-bitten, cynical, white-trash teenager who turns up on her doorstep? And what will happen to them both when the awful secret Cate is hiding is brought out into the open?

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From the Inside Flap:

Imagine Mark Haddon meets Alice Sebold and you have Patricia Tyrrell's The Reckoning.

In a phone booth beside a dusty Arizona highway, fifteen-year-old Cate listens in on yet another conversation between Les (the man who has raised her since she was a toddler) and her mother. But this is no ordinary chit chat, for the woman at the end of the line hasn't seen her daughter since she was three years old, and the man in the phone booth is the homeless drifter who abducted Cate from beside her sleeping parents over a decade ago.

Now Les has finally determined that the time has come for Cate to go home.

How will Cate cope with learning to love a mother she can't remember, and with learning to reject the father-figure she has loved for twelve years? How will her mother reconcile the memories of her three-year-old daughter with the hard-bitten, poorly educated and cynical teenager who turns up on her doorstep in Virginia? And what will happen to them both when the awful secret Cate is hiding is brought out into the open?

Electrifying, brilliantly written and taut with suspense, The Reckoning is an intense and riveting meditation on the themes of loss and reunion, parents and children, and nature versus nurture.
From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author:

Patricia Tyrrell is half-English and half-American. After living for some years in the US she is now based in Cornwall.

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