The Nowhere child is Kimberly Leamy/Sammy Went. She is not really nowhere, just between Manson, Kentucky, and Melbourne, Australia. At the age of 28, Kimberly is a photography teacher in Melbourne whose mother who raised her died of cancer four years previously. Out of nowhere, an American accountant contacts her, convinced that she was born Sammy Went in the Kentucky town of Manson to a family involved in a charismatic sect that handles snakes. He thinks Leamy is Went and was kidnapped by the woman she knew as her mother right after her second birthday. So Kimberly/Sammy comes to Kentucky to meet her possibly biological family and to try to figure out who she really is. Thus, this a novel of the intersection of two worlds. It was the 2017 Winner of Australia’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and became an international best seller. “A nervy, soulful, genuinely surprising it-could-happen-to-you thriller ― a book to make you peer over your shoulder for days afterwards.”―A.J. Finn. The author, Christian White, is an Australian screenwriter who lives in Melborne. This is his first novel.
New York: Minotaur Books, a 2020 first American paperback edition of a 2019 first American hardback edition of a 2017 Australian release. 400 pages. Trade paperback.