This is quite a sad tale of one woman’s need to have a child, in a marriage where the husband does not. Anna’s maternal instincts are expressed through the extra mile she will go to help the pupils she teaches but it is not enough, until one particular student seems to be someone who needs the maternal love she can provide. It is a story about choices made and regretted and moving on.
Anna’s personal life is in crisis. Her marriage is struggling, and the disastrous affair she began as consolation has now become a millstone around her neck. The place where she feels most secure is the safe and ordered world of the classroom; as a teacher she happily follows the rules, works hard and gets results.
Then the beautiful Kali arrives in her English group, a girl who is bright, unsettling, vulnerable and in need of guidance from an older woman. What could be more natural than for a caring teacher to show concern for a troubled pupil? Anna believes the friendship can save them both.
But when that friendship begins to tip over into something more intense, Anna finds her professional and domestic lives caught up together in a spiral that threatens to destroy everyone she ever cared about.
A former teacher, Kate Long born in 1964 grew up in Blackrod, Lancashire. She wrote her first novel, The Bad Mother's Handbook, after her children had gone to bed and "if there was nothing good on the telly." She currently lives with her husband and two young children in the small village in Shropshire.
