The Bookshelf Fairy: March 2020

Chergui's Child

by Jane Riddell

Genre: Women's Psychological Fiction

Olivia has much to cope with. An embittered mother who puts her ambitions for her children before their own needs. A predatory professor who ends their affair when she becomes pregnant. Giving birth to twins in a Tangier hospital and believing neither has survived. Grief and loss overwhelm her and she abandons her studies. Then from her beloved aunt Dorothy, artistic, eccentric and mysteriously wealthy, she learns that one of the babies did survive and has been adopted. When her aunt dies she leaves Olivia a handsome legacy with the condition that it must be used to find and bring up the lost child. Olivia’s journey takes her from London to the south of France, with startling and painful revelations along the way.

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Jane Riddell is the author of novels: Daughters of the Lake, Chergui’s Child and Things We Choose to Hide.  She has also written a novella in the form of a diary, penned by a Russian cat who comes to Edinburgh to learn about creative writing: The Bakhtin Chronicles: Academia.  Inspired by her own editing process, she has published a short guide entitled Words’Worth: a fiction writer’s guide to serious editing.

Formerly Jane worked as a dietitian and health promoter for the NHS in the UK.  But after three years living in the beautiful Rhône Alps area of France, she decided to devote her mental energy to writing.

Jane lives in Edinburgh and apart from an abiding love of chocolate (her only vice), her passions include travelling and photography.  She regularly looks after animals – mainly cats – all over Europe, which inspires her writing and indulges her photography.

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