{"id":399,"date":"2021-04-12T12:43:23","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T11:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/?p=399"},"modified":"2021-04-12T12:43:23","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T11:43:23","slug":"the-imposter-by-anna-wharton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/2021\/04\/12\/the-imposter-by-anna-wharton\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Imposter” by Anna Wharton"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a pre-publication proof copy of Anna Wharton\u2019s first novel, The Imposter which is due for release in early 2021. Anna has been a journalist, writer and ghost writer for many, many years and most notably worked alongside Wendy Mitchell on her bestselling memoir about her life with early onset Alzheimer\u2019s, Somebody I Used to Know<\/em>. It\u2019s easy to see how the time spent working on this amazing non-fiction book impacted Wharton\u2019s first novel. Dementia is a key theme running through The Imposter<\/em> and the description of both the illness and Grace, who is living with Alzheimer\u2019s are both incredibly accurate and deftly written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to be careful not to give away too many spoilers when describing The Imposter<\/em>. Suffice to say if you enjoy a well-written thriller with twists and turns and surprises along the way. You\u2019re going to really enjoy this novel. The main protagonist Chloe is an almost reclusive young woman who works as an archivist in a local newspaper by day and spends all her spare time caring for her Nan who has recently been diagnosed with Dementia. Chloe\u2019s life changes really quickly when her Nan\u2019s condition begins to decline so rapidly she\u2019s forced to move the older lady into a residential care facility. As Chloe faces this huge life change she also becomes obsessed with a decades old, missing child case she discovers in the archives at work. Chloe begins to lose touch with her Nan as she becomes more and more entangled in the lives of the missing child\u2019s parents who have never given up hope that their daughter might someday come home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not going to say too much about the missing child storyline in The Imposter<\/em> except to say it had me hooked from the start and still on tenterhooks four hundred pages later. Wharton is a brilliant storyteller with a gift for building up tension and introducing believable twists in her plotlines. As a Dementia narrative I also found The Imposter<\/em> very convincing. It includes so many familiar tropes I\u2019ve come to associate with Alzheimer\u2019s: wandering, confusing times and not recognising family members, forgetting when and what is appropriate to eat. Anyone who\u2019s spent time with a family member or loved one living with Alzheimer\u2019s will recognise both Grace\u2019s behaviour patterns and the ways in which Chloe attempts to protect and reassure her Nan. There\u2019s a scene near the start where Chloe is forced to buy yet another identical electric kettle to replace the ones her Nan has melted on the hob, which I\u2019ve experienced personally with family members who have Dementia. Wharton\u2019s depiction of Chloe is also spot on. Chloe both resents and relies upon the support of the care facility and social worker and Wharton does a wonderful job of capturing her frustration. It\u2019s abundantly clear that Wharton has done a huge amount of research into Dementia and as a result Grace is one of the more believable and accurate of the characters I\u2019ve encountered in my reading so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was also incredibly relieved to find that Dementia has not been reduced now to a plot device in The Imposter<\/em>. The storyline which explores Grace and Chloe\u2019s relationship runs parallel to the more thriller-like storyline in the novel and exists as a wonderful piece of character development, allowing us to get an insight into who Chloe is and how her relationship with her Nan has developed. I really enjoyed this novel. It was great to see a character with Dementia included in such a well-developed way in a novel which is not primarily about Dementia. I\u2019m looking forward to reading more of Anna Wharton\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Imposter was published by Mantle Books in 2021 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a pre-publication proof copy of Anna Wharton\u2019s first novel, The Imposter which is due for release in early 2021. Anna has been a journalist, writer and ghost writer for many, many years and most notably worked alongside Wendy Mitchell on her bestselling memoir about her life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,52,30,6,4,17,14],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-alzheimers","tag-crime-fiction","tag-english","tag-family","tag-novels","tag-residential-care-facility","tag-woman"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":400,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}