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The Marsh King’s Daughter

By The Crime Vault
Related Categories: The Crime Vault News

 

See below for an exclusive extract of The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne.

In hardback and ebook summer 2017.

‘Helena
If I told you my mother’s name, you’d recognize it right away. My mother was famous, though she never wanted to be. Hers wasn’t the kind of fame anyone would wish for – Jaycee Dugard, Amanda Berry, Elizabeth Smart fame, though my mother was none of them.

You’d recognize my mother’s name if I told it to you, and then you’d wonder – briefly, because the years when people cared about my mother are as long gone as she once was – where is she now, and didn’t she have a daughter while she was missing, and whatever happened to the little girl?

I could tell you that I was twelve and my mother twenty-eight when we were recovered from her captor; that I spent those years living in what the papers describe as a rundown farmhouse surrounded by swamp in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. That while I did learn to read thanks to a stack of National Geographic magazines from the 1950s and a yellowed edition of the collected poems of Robert Frost, I never went to school, never rode a bicycle, never knew electricity or running water. That the only people I spoke to during those twelve years were my mother and father. That I didn’t know we were captives until we were not.

I could tell you that my mother passed away two years ago, and while there was a decent amount of press coverage, you probably missed it because my mother died during a news cycle that included far more important stories. I can tell you what the papers did not: she never got over the years of captivity. She wasn’t an articulate, pretty, outspoken champion of the cause. There were no book deals for my timid, self-effacing, quiet wreck of a mother, no cover of TIME. My mother shrank from attention the way arrowroot leaves wither after a frost.

But I won’t tell you my mother’s name. Because this isn’t her story. It’s mine.’
The Marsh King’s Daughter © Karen Dionne – out July 2017

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Terms and conditions:

  1.  Ten people will each win a proof copy of The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne. These are not yet produced, so please note that winners will be contacted as per our conditions, but there will be a delay before receiving your reading copy! We hope you will receive your copy prior to Christmas 2016.
  2. The winners will be selected at random from the entries received in accordance with these terms and conditions by a member of the Little, Brown Book Group Marketing department, whose decision will be final.
  3. The winner may see their entry posted on the Little, Brown Book Group, The Crime Vault website and on other websites and social media accounts associated with the competition.
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  5. The prize draw opens at 12:01 am BST on 20 July 2016 and closes at 11:59 pm BST on 19 August 2016. Any entries received outside these specified times and dates will not be eligible for entry into the competition.
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