Families have secrets they hide even from themselves…It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five lives for ever. For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse. As grief quietly tears apart David's family, so a little girl must make her own way in the world as best she can.
Accolades
Winner of British Book Awards: Sainsbury's Popular Fiction Award 2008.
Reviews
"Edwards is a born novelist. . . . Rich with psychological detail and the nuances of human connection."-Chicago Tribune
"Unfolds from an absolutely gripping premise, drawing you deeply and irrevocably into the entangled lives of two families and the devastating secret that shaped them both. I loved this riveting story."-Sue Monk Kidd
"Anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper's Daughter."-The Washington Post
"Kim Edwards has written a novel so mesmerizing that I devoured it. . . . The Memory Keeper's Daughter has it all."-Sena Jeter Naslund
"Kim Edwards has created a tale of regret and redemption, of honest emotion, of characters haunted by their past. This is simply a beautiful book."-Jodi Picoult
Author Biography
Kim Edwards is the author of the short-story collection The Secrets of the Fire King, which was an alternate for the 1998 PEN/Hemingway Award, and has won the Whiting Award and the Nelson Algren Award. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky.
