Every parent's worst gap year nightmare...
Newly graduated photography student Lori Maddox spends the year after university travelling and visits 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'.
Suddenly communication stops and when the silence persists a frantic Jo and Tom report her missing. It is impossible to find out anything from 5,000 miles away so they travel out to Chengdu, a city in the south-western province of Sichuan, to search for their daughter.
Landing in a totally unfamiliar 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 challenge and, as the days pass, the fear that Lori is lost for good grows ever larger.
Praise for Cath Staincliffe: An intelligent and emotionally engaging moral workout - Daily Telegraph
Praise for Cath Staincliffe: It's always exciting to see a writer get better and better and Cath Staincliffe is doing just that. - Val McDermid
Praise for Cath Staincliffe: Stunning
Praise for Cath Staincliffe: Complex and satisfying. - Sunday Times
Cath Staincliffe was brought up in Bradford and went to university in Birmingham, after which she moved to Manchester. She started writing whilst on maternity leave with her first child, attending writers' workshops and publishing poetry and short stories in anthologies. Looking for Trouble, published by the Manchester publisher Crocus, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Award for Best First Novel and serialised on BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour.