The Child In Time comes highly recommended as the 1987 winner of the Whitbread prize for fiction. Stephen and Julie must come to terms with the tragedy of their three year old daughter disappearing. Stephen is a writer of children's books and Julie is a violinist whose lives are shattered by the tragedy.

He set the fish down and asked the girl for a carrier bag. She reached under a shelf and pulled one out. He took it and turned. Kate was gone. There was no one in the queue behind him. Unhurriedly he pushed the trolley clear, thinking she had ducked down behind the edge of the counter.

What follows is a compelling account of the disintegration of the family that once was. Both Stephen and Julie react in different ways. It is not long before they separate and deal with their loss individually. Stephen has his work on the sub-commitee that is supposed to be producing a new Government childcare manual. Julie retreats to a cottage on the edge of a pine plantation. As a sub-text we are privy to the machinations of the development of the new childcare manual. We also visit a time when Stephen's parents discuss his future at a time when his future is anything but certain. This also leads us to various perspectives on the notion of time. Two of the few friends with whom he maintains contact, Thelma a Theoretical Physicist and her husband Charles, give us insight into the nature of childhood and the fragility of adulthood.

He was sitting up all night agonising, and he was still out in the woods during the day, trying to maintain his innocence. But it was getting harder all the time. He was in his tree-house in his short trousers wondering whether he should style himself Lord Eaton, and whether anyone else had taken the name.

The end result is a hauntingly evocative tale of grand proportions and a journey into the lives of several people who must struggle with the concepts of childhood and time. To the wounds stubbornly indifferent to it and the healing which can only come from its passage. The Child In Time is rich in relevance to a fast paced world where childhood can be so fleeting and also to a world which can deliver blows from which recovery seems impossible. The Child In Time is superbly constructed and brims with astute observations. It succeeds in a type of redemption which is rare in literature and all the more remarkable for its sincerity and simplicity.