Half the World Away: a chilling evocation of a mother's worst nightmare

Discover every parent's worst gap year nightmare

Newly graduated photography student Lori Maddox spends the year after university travelling and ends up in China where she finds work as a private English tutor. Back in Manchester, her parents Jo and Tom, who separated when Lori was a toddler, follow her adventures on her blog, 'Lori In The Orient'. But then all communication stops and when the silence persists a frantic Jo and Tom report her missing to their local police. But it is impossible to find out anything from 5,000 miles away so they are compelled to travel out to Chengdu, a city in the south-western province of Sichuan, to search for their missing daughter.

Landing in a totally unfamiliar, alien country, with no knowledge of the customs or language and receiving scant help from the local authorities, Jo and Tom are forced to turn detective, following in their daughter's footsteps, tracing the people she mentioned in her posts, interviewing her friends, colleagues and students. It's an unbearably difficult and heartbreaking challenge and, as the days pass, the fear that Lori is lost to them for ever becomes harder to ignore...

'A fascinating glimpse into modern China' Sunday Mirror

Cath Staincliffe is an award winning novelist, radio playwright and creator of ITV's hit series Blue Murder. Cath's books have been shortlisted for the CWA Best First Novel award. She was joint winner of the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2012. Letters To My Daughter's Killer was selected for the Specsavers Crime Thriller Book Club on ITV3 in 2014. Cath also writes the Scott & Bailey books based on the popular ITV series. She lives with her family in Manchester.