Product Description
Dear Doctor Woodruff, I hope you don't mind me writing to you.
I think I'm your daughter....
This international bestseller is a startlingly assured first novel of deception, ambiguity, and shattering revelations.
At the height of his career, a British surgeon has found success in both the hospital and at home. He and his wife have everything they want out of life, except the child she longs for, the child Dr. Woodruff secretly believes he may never be ready to parent.
Suddenly, the delicate equilibrium of their relationship is blown apart by the arrival of shocking news. Deep in the desolate sub-Arctic wilderness of Canada where Woodruff lived and worked years before, a woman claims he is the father of her thirteen-year-old twins.
Woodruff knows it cannot be true -- but DNA tests don't lie.
To make sense of the impossible, he must return to that frozen wilderness, where no rules and few laws apply. Leaving his shattered relationship behind, he finds that his well-guarded secrets have even deeper and more sinister layers. But the people he once knew in that godforsaken place guard secrets of their own, and no one -- least of all the ruthless woman at the dark core of this maelstrom -- will help him uncover the truth.
The past quickly gains a stranglehold, threatening to unravel everything Woodruff has built -- his marriage, his career. And a man who has made one mistake may pay dearly for another -- and risk destroying his entire future....
- A Bertelsmann Book Club International Book of the Month
- A Literary Guild Main Selection
- Shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger Award
- Shortlisted for the Hay Festival Welsh Book of the Year
Amazon.com Review
Kitty Sewell's Ice Trap starts with a bombshell. Dafydd Woodruff, who's desperately been trying to conceive a child with his wife, receives a letter: "Dear Doctor Woodruff, I hope you don't mind me writing to you. I think I'm your daughter..." Suddenly, a relatively innocent past takes over his present life, and that of his wife. It further develops that there isn't just a daughter; this purported "daughter" is actually one of twins, a girl and a boy. Deep in the remote, sub-arctic wilderness where Dafydd had worked 15 years earlier, these children were conceived and born to a woman for whom he felt little but animosity. She was--and still is at the time the novel takes place--head nurse in the hospital where Dafydd did a locum. He was running away from a tragic medical accident, and this distant area seemed like a good place to escape to.
DNA tests are ordered immediately to clear Dafydd in his wife's eyes. The tests are positive, the marriage is very precarious, and Dafydd goes back to the Canadian wilderness to sort things out. What he finds there is complex and compelling. The surprises are not set-ups but develop organically, making the story believable. This is the extremely self-assured debut of a writer to watch. She has deftly created landscape, character, mood and suspense to bring her story to its snapper of a conclusion. --Valerie Ryan