Melbourne art teacher Kimberly Leamy is told that she may be Sammy Went, abducted at age two from her family in Manson, KY. Winner of Australia's 2017 Victorian Premier's Literary Award.

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. VERDICT White's tightly woven debut thriller has already won the Victorian Premier Literary Award in Australia; its arrival Stateside comes highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 7/2/18.]—Cynthia Price, Francis Marion Univ. Lib., Florence, SC

At the start of White's outstanding debut, American James Finn approaches Kim Leamy while she's taking a between-class break at the Melbourne, Australia, school where she teaches photography. Finn claims that Kim is Sammy Went, a child kidnapped from her Kentucky home at the age of two in 1990. Of course, Kim's initial reaction is that he's talking nonsense. As far as she knows, her family has always lived in Australia, and she has a birth certificate. But Finn—who soon admits he's Sammy's elder brother, Stuart—has reams of convincing documentation gleaned from decades of searching, including DNA proof. Kim/Sammy's first-person narrative as she and Stuart attempt to unearth details of her abduction alternates with a third-person omniscient account of the kidnapping and subsequent investigation. By juxtaposing past and present, the author keeps the tension high. The impatient may be tempted to skip ahead, but they shouldn't. Thriller fans will want to savor every crumb of evidence and catch every clue. White is definitely a writer to watch. Agents: Jennifer Naughton and Candice Thom, RGM. (Jan.)