• An Amazon Best Book of the Year for 2016 • Costa Book Award for First Novel finalist • Dagger Award finalist Newly single mom Beth has one constant, gnawing worry: that her dreamy eight-year-old daughter, Carmel, who has a tendency to wander off, will one day go missing. And then one day, it happens: On a Saturday morning thick with fog, Beth takes Carmel to a local outdoor festival, they get separated in the crowd, and Carmel is gone. Shattered, Beth sets herself on the grim and lonely mission to find her daughter, keeping on relentlessly even as the authorities tell her that Carmel may be gone for good. Carmel, meanwhile, is on a strange and harrowing journey of her own—to a totally unexpected place that requires her to live by her wits, while trying desperately to keep in her head, at all times, a vision of her mother … Alternating between Beth’s story and Carmel’s, and written in gripping prose that won’t let go, The Girl in the Red Coat—like Emma Donoghue’s Room and M. L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans—is an utterly immersive story that’s impossible to put down . . . and impossible to forget. "Kate Hamer’s gripping debut novel immediately recalls the explosion of similarly titled books and movies, from Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, to The Girl on the Train to Gone Girl … "—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Keeps the reader turning pages at a frantic clip... What’s most powerful here is not whodunnit, or even why, but how this mother and daughter bear their separation, and the stories they tell themselves to help endure it.” —Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You) “Compulsively readable...Beautifully written and unpredictable, I had to stop myself racing to the end to find out what happened.” —Rosamund Lupton (Sister) “Both gripping and sensitive — beautifully written, it is a compulsive, aching story full of loss and redemption.” —Lisa Ballantyne (The Guilty One) "Hamer’s dark tale of the lost and found is nearly impossible to put down.” —Booklist

Roma Ligocka chronicles her experiences during the Holocaust, reflecting on how her own life seemed to mirror that of a little girl in a red coat that was depicted in the film "Schindler's List".

Think Downton Abbey, set in the heart of Boston Irish domestic worker Norah King's decision to ask her wealthy employer, Caroline Parker, for an elegant red coat that the Beacon Hill matriarch has marked for donation ignites a series of events that neither woman could have fathomed. The unlikely exchange will impact their respective daughters and families for generations to come, from the coat's original owner, marriage-minded collegian Cordelia Parker, to the determined and spirited King sisters of South Boston, Rosemary, Kay, and Rita. As all of these young women experience the realities of life – love and loss, conflict and joy, class prejudices and unexpected prospects – the red coat reveals the distinction between cultures, generations, and landscapes in Boston during the 1940s and 50s, a time of change, challenge, and opportunity. Meet the proud, working-class Irish and staid, upper-class Brahmins through the contrasting lives of these two families and their friends and neighbors. See how the Parkers and the Kings each overcome sudden tragedy with resolve and triumph. And witness the profound impact of a mother’s heart on her children’s souls. Carlson brings us front and center with her knowing weave of Celtic passion – both tragic and joyful – words of wisdom, romance, humor, and historical events. Dive into Boston feet first! The Red Coat is a rich novel that chronicles the legacy of Boston from both sides of the city, Southie and the Hill.

“[Evokes] both Jeanette Winterson and Ian McEwan . . . an elegiac and uplifting novel about the indissoluble bonds between mothers and daughters, and a reminder of how the imagination can set you free.” — The Guardian On Ruby’s thirteenth birthday, a wish she didn’t even know she had suddenly comes true: the couple who raised her aren’t her parents at all. Her real mother and father are out there somewhere, and Ruby becomes determined to find them. Venturing into the forest with nothing but a suitcase and the company of her only true friend—the imaginary Shadow Boy—Ruby discovers a group of siblings who live alone in the woods. The children take her in, and while they offer the closest Ruby’s ever had to a family, Ruby begins to suspect that they might need her even more than she needs them. And it’s not always clear what’s real and what’s not—or who’s trying to help her and who might be a threat. Told from shifting timelines, and the alternating perspectives of teenage Ruby; her mother, Anna; and even the Shadow Boy, The Doll Funeral is a dazzling follow-up to Kate Hamer’s breakout debut, The Girl in the Red Coat, and a gripping, exquisitely mysterious novel about the connections that remain after a family has been broken apart.

From the national bestselling author of Alice comes a postapocalyptic take on the perennial classic "Little Red Riding Hood"...about a woman who isn't as defenseless as she seems. It's not safe for anyone alone in the woods. There are predators that come out at night: critters and coyotes, snakes and wolves. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that doesn't look anything like the one she grew up in, the one that was perfectly sane and normal and boring until three months ago. There are worse threats in the woods than the things that stalk their prey at night. Sometimes, there are men. Men with dark desires, weak wills, and evil intents. Men in uniform with classified information, deadly secrets, and unforgiving orders. And sometimes, just sometimes, there's something worse than all of the horrible people and vicious beasts combined. Red doesn't like to think of herself as a killer, but she isn't about to let herself get eaten up just because she is a woman alone in the woods....

Dr. Kevin Flynn, a family physician and a coroner in Ontario, Canada accidentally breaks a family heirloom and finds four documents that start him on the trail of documenting a family tragedy set in his school-teacher parents' home in rural Ireland nine decades past. His family in Ireland did not talk about the past and what little information became available in his younger years proved to be incorrect. Using his experience of death investigation in Canada for thirty years, his odyssey takes him back to the land of his birth in search of documents in the National Archives of Ireland and interviews with people still alive who helped to throw light on the mystery and to discover and document the truth about how two sisters, Philomena, age one year and ten months and Maureen age six years and nine months, whom he never knew, came to their deaths at the hands of a teenage girl. Mary Cole had been a pupil at the Camross National School and was taught by the parents of Dr. Flynn. They took the girl into their home after she finished her primary education to care for their family of five small children in the village of Camross, nestled in the shade of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in the Irish midlands. Mr. Flynn discovered that the live-in 15 year old girl, mature beyond her years, misbehaved with some local boys at night, and after she was confronted by her employers, she denied her guilt two times until the truth was revealed before the local Parish Priest. This true story of deceit and betrayal by a young girl who nursed, fed and cared for the children of the schoolmaster and his teacher wife unites the tragedy that unfolded with Ireland's recovery from a brutal civil war with the transition from the English colonial education system that suppressed the proud traditions of the Irish language and history until the War of Independence that fostered the rebirth of national pride. It is a tale of revenge for being exposed twice before the priest and the perceived loss of her good name at the cost of two innocent and vulnerable children. So ingenious was Mary Cole that two deaths and two fires were deemed to be accidental, even after an inquest by the local coroner until after Michael and Statia Flynn had left Camross for the town of Tipperary where the author was later born and where he grew up thinking that he was 'one of ten' instead of 'one of twelve'. Astute investigation by An Garda Síochána detectives based their suspicions on a simple red woollen coat, hand made by the children's mother. Read how the poignant discovery of the little red coat in the National Archives in Dublin and the striking out of Maureen's name from the school roll book by her teacher mother were revealed.

A good story can change. In The Girl in Red, acclaimed illustrator Roberto Innocenti offers a modern take on the centuries-old tale of an ailing grandmother, a wicked wolf, and a young girl in a red coat. Innocenti's brilliantly detailed illustrations present a city as a wilderness, while text by Aaron Frisch narrates the journey of a girl named Sophia through the twists and turns of a stormy day.